Top 380 John Irving Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— John Irving

153. “It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced – when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.”

— John Irving

154. “The gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.”

— John Irving

155. “I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.”

— John Irving

156. “The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.”

— John Irving

157. “I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald’s sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her – as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.”

— John Irving

158. “A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.”

— John Irving

159. “Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love.”

— John Irving

160. “She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance.”

— John Irving

161. “Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else’s version of themselves – to anyone else’s version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!”

— John Irving

162. “I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.”

— John Irving

163. “Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.”

— John Irving

164. “Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax...”

— John Irving

165. “I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.”

— John Irving

166. “Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.”

— John Irving

167. “The way you remember or dream about your loved ones – the ones who are gone – you can’t stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You don’t get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind – in your dreams, in your memories – sometimes the story begins with the epilogue.”

— John Irving

168. “In every life,” Dolores had said, “I think there’s always a moment when you must decide where you belong.”

— John Irving

169. “In other parts of the world, they have double-bed sheets,” wrote Wilbur Larch in A Brief History of St. Cloud’s. “Here in St. Cloud’s we do without – we just do without.”

— John Irving

170. “Always be suspicious of easy work,” Dr. Wilbur Larch once said to Homer Wells.”

— John Irving

171. “Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either.”

— John Irving

172. “Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don’t mean that you can’t also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.”

— John Irving

173. “My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.”

— John Irving

174. “Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer – not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: 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. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.”

— John Irving

175. “There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.”

— John Irving

176. “I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.”

— John Irving

177. “Technical Sergeant Garp, the late gunner whose familiarity with violent death cannot be exaggerated, served with the Eighth Air Force – the air force that bombed the Continent from England.”

— John Irving

178. “My dear boy, ” Miss Frost said sharply. “My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me – don’t make a category before you get to know me!”

— John Irving

179. “What we witnessed with the death of Kennedy was the triumph of television; what we saw with his assassination, and with his funeral, was the beginning of television’s dominance of our culture – for television is at its most solemnly self-serving and at its mesmerizing best when it is depicting the untimely deaths of the chosen and the golden. It is as witness to the butchery of heroes in their prime – and of all holy-seeming innocents – that televisions achieves its deplorable greatness.”

— John Irving

180. “This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.”

— John Irving

181. “At that moment, everyone walks on the sky. Maybe all great decisions are made without a net,” The Wonder herself had told him. “There comes a time, in every life, when you must let go.”

— John Irving

182. “Garp didn’t want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.”

— John Irving

183. “A loving couple will say things to each other – you know, Danny – just to make each other feel good about a situation, even if the situation isn’t good, or it they shouldn’t feel good about i,” Ketchum said. “A loving couple will make up their own rules, as if these made-up rules were as reliable or counted for as much as the rules everyone else tried to live by – if you know what I mean.”

— John Irving

184. “Did the rhythm of the train on the tracks somehow unravel her and make her behave out of character? Was she altered in transit, when her feet were not upon the ground?”

— John Irving

185. “Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”

— John Irving

186. “These Princes of Maine, these Kings of New England, these orphans of Saint Cloud’s – whoever they were, they were the heroes of their own lives. That much Homer could see in the darkness, that much Dr. Larch, like a father, gave him.”

— John Irving

187. “Don’t get your balls crossed about it.”

— John Irving

188. “Don’t ever die,” Juan Diego had written to Brother Pepe from Iowa City. What Juan Diego meant was that HE would die if he lost Pepe.”

— John Irving

189. “It’s long been a point of mine that the freedom of religion, which this country alleges to support, works two ways. We’re not only free to practice the religion of our choice, we should be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.”

— John Irving

190. “This mannerism of what he’d seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people – because, surely, Wally was nice – would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud’s, criticism was plainer – and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.”

— John Irving

191. “What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.”

— John Irving

192. “You don’t want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.”

— John Irving

193. “The chairman of the state board of medical examiners was a retired physician who thought that President Teddy Roosevelt was the only other man in the world besides himself who had not been made from a banana.”

— John Irving

194. “Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers.”

— John Irving

195. “Flor and Juan Diego and Lupe were the Iowan’s projects; Edward Bonshaw saw them through the eyes of a born reformer, but he did not love them less for looking upon them in this fashion.”

— John Irving

196. “People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.”

— John Irving

197. “This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.”

— John Irving

198. “He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.”

— John Irving

199. “I realize that a writer’s business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.”

— John Irving

200. “She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything – maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.”

— John Irving