Top 380 John Irving Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Being wrong about important things is exhausting.”

— John Irving

202. “Well, you finally got me,” Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.”

— John Irving

203. “Not every collision course comes as a surprise.”

— John Irving

204. “A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.”

— John Irving

205. “Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.”

— John Irving

206. “All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.”

— John Irving

207. “There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.”

— John Irving

208. “But Vienna was in its death phase; it lay still and let me look at it, and think about it, and look again. In a living city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don’t hold still.”

— John Irving

209. “But not even a drunk can sleep through Boellmann’s Toccata – not even outside the church, apparently. Alice enjoyed acting out how the drunken down-and-out had presented himself.”

— John Irving

210. “Logic is relative.”

— John Irving

211. “The lie, of course, is more interesting.”

— John Irving

212. “As a self-described Guadalupe girl, Lupe was sensitive to Guadalupe being overshadowed by the “Mary Monster.” Lupe not only meant that Mary was the most dominant of the Catholic Church’s “stable” of virgins; Lupe believed that the Virgin Mary was also “a domineering virgin.”

— John Irving

213. “Like the rooftop dogs, they were lost souls – they were running wild, or they drifted around town like ghosts.”

— John Irving

214. “Well, that boy’s voice,” my grandmother told me, “that boy’s voice could bring those mice back to life!” And it occurs to me now that Owen’s voice was the voice of all those murdered mice, coming back to life – with a vengeance.”

— John Irving

215. “Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.”

— John Irving

216. “If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it’s dark; he’d lose the ball.”

— John Irving

217. “Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there was no room for doubt, there would be no room for me. – FREDERICK BUECHNER.”

— John Irving

218. “There is at least one terrible thing about lovers – real lovers, I mean: people who are in love with each other, even then they will relish their every physical contact in a sexual way; even when they’re supposed to be in a kind of mourning, they can get aroused. Franny and I simply couldn’t have gone on holding each other on the stairs: it was impossible to touch each other, at all, and not want to touch everything.”

— John Irving

219. “We’ve been an empire in decline since I can remember,” Ketchum said bluntly; he wasn’t kidding. “We are a lost nation, Danny. Stop farting around.”

— John Irving

220. “What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too.”

— John Irving

221. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.”

— John Irving

222. “He felt fortunate to be with Helen; she had her own ambitions and he could not manipulate here.”

— John Irving

223. “Dr. Larch pointed out that Melony had taken Jane Eyre with her; he accepted this as a hopeful sign – wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she’ll keep reading it, and reading it, Larch thought.”

— John Irving

224. “What a power I had discovered! I felt certain I could refill those bleacher seats – one day, I was sure, I could “see” everyone who’d been there; I could find that special someone my mother had waved to, at the end.”

— John Irving

225. “Vielleicht muss es im Leben eines Schriftstellers diesen Augenblick geben, in dem ein anderer Schriftsteller beschuldigt wird, seinen Beruf verfehlt zu haben.”

— John Irving

226. “It was not out of love that I wanted to meet my father, but out of the darkest curiosity – to be able to recognize, in myself, what evil I might be capable of.”

— John Irving

227. “You’d better leave your chromosomes at the door.”

— John Irving

228. “Treading water, a little dog-paddling – it’s a lot like writing a novel, Clark,” the dump reader told his former student. “It feels like you’re going a long way, because it’s a lot of work, but you’re basically covering old ground – you’re hanging out in familiar territory.”

— John Irving

229. “I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.”

— John Irving

230. “Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.”

— John Irving

231. “I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.”

— John Irving

232. “People are like that... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.’ And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety – it stands alongside our sameness.”

— John Irving

233. “People regard art too highly, and history not enough.”

— John Irving

234. “Here come the characters who comprise the movie vermin, the Hollywood scum, the film slime – the aforementioned “unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity.” Fortunately, they are minor characters, yet so distasteful that their introduction has been delayed as long as possible.”

— John Irving

235. “He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.”

— John Irving

236. “I shared my grandmother’s distaste for the word rector – it sounded too much like rectum to be taken seriously.”

— John Irving

237. “The chain of events, the links in our lives – what leads us where we’re going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don’t see coming, and what we do – all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.”

— John Irving

238. “Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it’s still going to be a comic novel.”

— John Irving

239. “As for Jenny, she felt only that women – just like men – should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.”

— John Irving

240. “The student and the teacher had contrasting ideas about the sentence, which was: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

— John Irving

241. “I think you’re being selfish.” “What do you mean, selfish?” Wally asked. “A war is for your country, it’s serving your country!” “To you, it’s an adventure,” Candy said. “That’s what’s selfish about it.”

— John Irving

242. “Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things.”

— John Irving

243. “Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.”

— John Irving

244. “Juan Diego lived there, in the past – reliving, in his imagination, the losses that had marked him.”

— John Irving

245. “It’s Shakespearean, Bill; lots of the important stuff in Shakespeare happens offstage – you just hear about it.”

— John Irving

246. “I walked all the way through the Heldenplatz – the Plaza of Heroes – and stood where thousands of cheering fascists had greeted Hitler, once. I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the size of the audience.”

— John Irving

247. “There comes a moment in every life when you must let go with your hands – with both hands.”

— John Irving

248. “When the lies of omission unravel, so does the story.”

— John Irving

249. “He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson.”

— John Irving

250. “I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sheets and cuts the pasta into any shape you want. It’s important to have toys like that, if you live in Maine.”

— John Irving