Top 380 John Irving Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— John Irving

255. “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

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

258. “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

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

— John Irving

260. “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

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

— John Irving

262. “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

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— John Irving

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— John Irving

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

286. “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

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

— John Irving

288. “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

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

— John Irving

290. “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

291. “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

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

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

— John Irving

298. “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

299. “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

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

— John Irving