Top 380 John Irving Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.”

— John Irving

52. “Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.”

— John Irving

53. “The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.”

— John Irving

54. “I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.”

— John Irving

55. “The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable – some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.”

— John Irving

56. “Sometimes that’s a year, sometimes it’s 18 months, where all I’m doing is taking notes. I’m reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.”

— John Irving

57. “May God watch over your soul, which no man may abuse.”

— John Irving

58. “The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.”

— John Irving

59. “Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.”

— John Irving

60. “I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.”

— John Irving

61. “We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.”

— John Irving

62. “Sell my old clothes – I’m off to heaven.”

— John Irving

63. “It’s not right to hurt or deceive someone who’s already been hurt and deceived.”

— John Irving

64. “Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.”

— John Irving

65. “A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy.”

— John Irving

66. “They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.”

— John Irving

67. “The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again. The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you – just watching you, waiting for you to wake up.”

— John Irving

68. “You think you have a memory; but it has you!”

— John Irving

69. “My brain is sending poison to my heart.”

— John Irving

70. “In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”

— John Irving

71. “As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.”

— John Irving

72. “When time passes, it’s the people who knew you whom you want to see; they’re the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what’s it matter what they did to you?”

— John Irving

73. “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”

— John Irving

74. “A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.”

— John Irving

75. “But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.”

— John Irving

76. “All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.”

— John Irving

77. “Never confuse faith, or belief – of any kind – with something even remotely intellectual.”

— John Irving

78. “The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.”

— John Irving

79. “To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.”

— John Irving

80. “The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.”

— John Irving

81. “People only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.”

— John Irving

82. “I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.”

— John Irving

83. “Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean––make sure they know what they mean!”

— John Irving

84. “Just because you’re sober, don’t think you’re a good driver, Cookie.”

— John Irving

85. “How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.”

— John Irving

86. “You can’t protect people, kiddo,” Wally said. “All you can do is love them.”

— John Irving

87. “Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We’re screwed down here-for life!”

— John Irving

88. “Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?”

— John Irving

89. “If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital.”

— John Irving

90. “It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.”

— John Irving

91. “You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.”

— John Irving

92. “The World According to Bensenhaver,” the book jacket flap said, “is about a man who is so fearful of bad things happening to his loved ones that he creates an atmosphere of such tension that bad things are almost certain to occur. And they do.”

— John Irving

93. “Love also floats. And, that being true, love probably resembles Sorrow in other ways.”

— John Irving

94. “The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings; the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.”

— John Irving

95. “He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.”

— John Irving

96. “The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.”

— John Irving

97. “Life is an X-rated soap opera.”

— John Irving

98. “All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.”

— John Irving

99. “Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.”

— John Irving

100. “We don’t always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly – as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth – the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.”

— John Irving