Top 380 John Irving Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “There was no solution,” Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “but the universal solution that life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day – that is forget oneself.”

— John Irving

102. “I’m a worst-case scenario person. I’m only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.”

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

104. “It’s a no-win argument – that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.”

— John Irving

105. “You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.”

— John Irving

106. “Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.”

— John Irving

107. “Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.”

— John Irving

108. “It doesn’t really matter who said it – it’s so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.”

— John Irving

109. “The object of war is to survive it.”

— John Irving

110. “Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.”

— John Irving

111. “When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.”

— John Irving

112. “Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.”

— John Irving

113. “And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won’t forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”

— John Irving

114. “You don’t want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven’t done what I do. Most book reviewers haven’t written 11 novels. Many of them haven’t written one.”

— John Irving

115. “A novel is a piece of architecture. It’s not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It’s a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.”

— John Irving

116. “Human beings are remarkable – at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn’t get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can’t have, then we couldn’t ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?”

— John Irving

117. “I’m not a movie person. They’re collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.”

— John Irving

118. “Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult – in any way – something in your childhood dies.”

— John Irving

119. “Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.”

— John Irving

120. “Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”

— John Irving

121. “We invent what we love and what we fear.”

— John Irving

122. “I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.”

— John Irving

123. “Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.”

— John Irving

124. “As Garp put it, ‘You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.’ Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions.”

— John Irving

125. “Old Lowji’s nasty remark would haunt Farrokh forever: “Immigrants are immigrants all their lives!” Once someone makes such a negative pronouncement, you might refute it but you never forget it; some ideas are so vividly planted, they become visible objects, actual things.”

— John Irving

126. “It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you can’t interfere with people you love anymore than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know.”

— John Irving

127. “Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.”

— John Irving

128. “More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.”

— John Irving

129. “But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.”

— John Irving

130. “I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave – and nothing but laughter to console them with.”

— John Irving

131. “I don’t want you to describe to me – not ever – what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.”

— John Irving

132. “If watching television doesn’t hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something – just by staying alive.”

— John Irving

133. “There’s a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There’s a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.”

— John Irving

134. “Life is an X-rated soap opera.”

— John Irving

135. “And the thing about being in love,” Wally said to Angel, “is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard,” he added, “because you often feel like interfering – you want to be the one who makes the plans.”

— John Irving

136. “It was a deus-ex-machina world!”

— John Irving

137. “I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you’re going to be in this business, if you’re going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.”

— John Irving

138. “If you can’t love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?”

— John Irving

139. “It was Owen Meany who taught me that any good book is always in motion – from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading – and good writing about reading – moves the same way.”

— John Irving

140. “And I find – I’m 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn’t diminished any. That’s the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.”

— John Irving

141. “If we couldn’t get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can’t have, then we couldn’t ever get strong enough.”

— John Irving

142. “I don’t begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don’t mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.”

— John Irving

143. “You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.”

— John Irving

144. “I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story – better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you’re capable of making it.”

— John Irving

145. “If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don’t think I’m very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.”

— John Irving

146. “Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy.”

— John Irving

147. “You don’t have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister; you don’t have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner’s faith.”

— John Irving

148. “The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.”

— John Irving

149. “There’s no reason you should write any novel quickly.”

— John Irving

150. “But Lupe both genuinely worshiped Our Lady of Guadalupe and fiercely doubted her; Lupe’s doubt was borne by the child’s judgmental sense that Guadalupe had submitted to the Virgin Mary – that Guadalupe was complicitous in allowing Mother Mary to be in control.”

— John Irving