Top 380 John Irving Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— John Irving

253. “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

254. “Only the chicken-lover will understand me. He will give me a kindly look, maybe mildly desirous. His eyes will tell me: You might look a lot better with some reddish-brown feathers.”

— John Irving

255. “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

256. “He hadn’t known many British, but some of them seemed crazy to him, and so it seemed a small thing to agree to – and Wally thought it was wise to agree with whoever it was who held the catheter.”

— John Irving

257. “The code of small towns is simple but encompassing: if many forms of craziness are allowed, many forms of cruelty are ignored. Piggy.”

— John Irving

258. “Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments – responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.”

— John Irving

259. “I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.”

— John Irving

260. “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

261. “We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.”

— John Irving

262. “I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.”

— John Irving

263. “Jenny felt that her education was merely a polite way to bide time, as if she were really a cow, being prepared only for the insertion of the device for artificial insemination. Her.”

— John Irving

264. “There were some very good books in the backseat of the little Volkswagen; good books were the best protection from evil that Pepe had actually held in his hands – you could not hold faith in Jesus in your hands, not in quite the same way you could hold good books.”

— John Irving

265. “The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law-they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood!”

— John Irving

266. “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

267. “Dear God!” the cook cried. “Soon all the wood on Twisted River will be pulpwood – for paper! What about toboggans is worse than paper?” “Books are made from paper!” Ketchum declared. “What role do toboggans play in your son’s education?”

— John Irving

268. “I’m not proselytizing my method. I don’t believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.”

— John Irving

269. “But I had to keep my hands under the desk – my fists under the desk, I should say. The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law – they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood! I know that some of the girls have told their parents that I deliver “ranting lectures” to them about the United States; some.”

— John Irving

270. “Of course, everyone is intolerant of something or someone.”

— John Irving

271. “But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that is what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear.”

— John Irving

272. “Now and forever,” Juan Diego said, more confidently. He knew this was a promise to himself – to seize every opportunity that looked like the future, from this moment forward.”

— John Irving

273. “What Brother Pepe saw in Edward Bonshaw was a man who looked like he belonged – like a man who had never felt at home, but who’d suddenly found his place in the scheme of things.”

— John Irving

274. “And you wouldn’t want to bring her home – at least not to entertain your guests or amuse the children. No, Juan Diego thought – you would want to keep her, all for yourself.”

— John Irving

275. “It had been an evening in the empty dance hall when not even that depth of stone and the constant stirring of the ceiling fans could cool the stifling and humid night air, which had entered the Duckworth Club as heavily as a fog from the Arabian Sea. Even atheists, like Lowji, were praying for the monsoon rains. After.”

— John Irving

276. “So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.”

— John Irving

277. “I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there’s a construction that works from back to front.”

— John Irving

278. “Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else.”

— John Irving

279. “No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin – only four years older than I am – everything, or what little I could discover about him.”

— John Irving

280. “If you want to worry about something, you ought to worry about how Guadalupe was looking at you. Like she’s still making up her mind about you. Guadalupe hasn’t decided about you,” the clairvoyant child had told him.”

— John Irving

281. “If I had to be anything,” he told her, “I’d probably be a socialist, but I don’t want to be anything.”

— John Irving

282. “I don’t begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.”

— John Irving

283. “I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.”

— John Irving

284. “A book feels true when it feels true,” she said to him, impatiently. “A book’s true when you can say, ‘Yeah! That’s just how damn people behave all the time.”

— John Irving

285. “Three nights at the Hotel zum Storchen – a decent hotel”, Farrokh explained. “Your room overlooks the Limmat. You can walk in the old town, or to the lake. Have you ever been in Europe?”

— John Irving

286. “According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I’d written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked – she meant reality, of course.”

— John Irving

287. “But she drew the line at television. It took no effort to watch – it was infinitely more beneficial to the soul, and to the intelligence, to read or to listen – and what she imagined there was to watch on TV appalled her; she had, of course, only read about it.”

— John Irving

288. “Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.”

— John Irving

289. “The day women stop reading – that’s the day the novel dies!”

— John Irving

290. “Even Clark French’s novels exerted a tenacious and combative goodwill: his main characters, lost souls and serial sinners, always found redemption; the act of redeeming usually followed a moral low point; the novels predictably ended in a crescendo of benevolence.”

— John Irving

291. “She say to tell you you was the nicest,” Muddy told the boy. “She say to tell your dad he a hero, and that you was the nicest.”

— John Irving

292. “Real life is too sloppy a model for good fiction,” Juan Diego had said.”

— John Irving

293. “With women, Ernie Holm had some experience at taking no for an answer.”

— John Irving

294. “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

295. “You’re not like anyone else, Billy – that’s what’s the matter with you,” Donna said.”

— John Irving

296. “I do know where I’m going and it’s just a matter of finding the language to get there.”

— John Irving

297. “He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.”

— John Irving

298. “When I was still in prep school – 14, 15 – I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.”

— John Irving

299. “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

300. “Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can’t turn you away.”

— John Irving