Top 380 John Irving Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 8

201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

208. “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

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

211. “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

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

214. “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

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

— John Irving

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.”

— John Irving

220. “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

221. “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

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

224. “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

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

— John Irving

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.”

— John Irving

230. “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

231. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

232. “It’s as if you’ve been shot in the heart, Bill, but you’re unaware of the hole or the loss of blood. I doubt you even heard the shot!”

— John Irving

233. “When somebody touches you... and you really don’t wanna be touched, that’s not really being touched. You still got you inside of you. And nobody has touched you. Not really. You still got you inside of you. You believe that.”

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

235. “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

236. “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

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

— John Irving

238. “We all go through a phase – it lasts a lifetime, for some of us – when we’re embarrassed by our parents; we don’t want them hanging around us because we’re afraid they’ll do or say something that will make us feel ashamed of them.”

— John Irving

239. “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

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

— John Irving

241. “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

242. “You should listen to these people, Farrokh,” his father was telling him. “It isn’t necessary for them to be your moral equals in order for you to learn something from them.”

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

244. “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

245. “It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.”

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

247. “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

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

250. “When you lie, it makes you feel in charge of your life. Telling lies is very seductive to orphans. I know because I tell them, too. I love to lie. When you lie, you feel as if you have cheated fate – your own, and everybody else’s.”

— John Irving