Top 380 John Irving Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “How I live matters more than what I do. I have ambitions for the quality of how I live. I have no ambition for making money... and I’d have time to read enough to be a constant source of information, ideas and language.”

— John Irving

352. “He was asleep – he was still dreaming – though his lips were moving. No one heard him; no one hears a writer who’s writing in his sleep.”

— John Irving

353. “It seemed to Alice that the drunk should have been struck dead for using such language in a church, but before God could take any action against the down-and-out, William resumed playing – with a vengeance.”

— John Irving

354. “Loved ones leave us and we go on – ghosts or no ghosts, my way or Molly’s, we still see them. As Matthew and I knew, the dead don’t entirely go away – not if you see them on the subway, or in your heart.”

— John Irving

355. “This gets complicated, because I know that not all ghosts are dead. In certain cases, you can be a ghost and still be half-alive – only a significant part of you has died. I wonder how many of these half-alive ghosts are aware of what has died in them, and – dead or alive – if there are rules for ghosts.”

— John Irving

356. “But that’s the test, Ruthie. The test is, sometimes there’s no place to pull over – sometimes you can’t stop, and you have to find a way to keep going. You got it?”

— John Irving

357. “It’s hard to pretend to be born without causing offense.”

— John Irving

358. “The snowshoer had written about Reagan – just one sentence, after seeing her friends who were dying of AIDS. “If or when there’s another plague, I hope America has a better plague president than Ronald Reagan,” the little English teacher wrote.”

— John Irving

359. “When you write about your life as a screenplay, it’s as if you’re watching someone else’s life; it’s not your life, and you’re not living it. You’re only seeing what the characters do, your character included. And screenplays are written in the present tense – as if nothing has already happened, as if everything is unfolding in the present. I’m only saying this is how it started – how I began to see my life as an unmade movie. The way it began was almost natural. INT.”

— John Irving

360. “You don’t choose your nightmares; they choose you.”

— John Irving

361. “A what?” said Egg. No doubt he thought that an inferiority complex was a weapon; sometimes, I guess, it is.”

— John Irving

362. “It was in looking at sea gulls that it first occurred to Homer Wells that he was free.”

— John Irving

363. “Murder, more murders, still more murders! The Germans take murder more seriously than we do – I mean, as literature,” Uncle Johan explained.”

— John Irving

364. “What my grandmother meant was that supper was ready to eat. Only the cooking of it was finished. As usual, it was an overcooked casserole of unidentifiable ingredients; it was mortally finished, a casserole cooked into submission. Also finished was what remained of my aunts’ patience with my uncles’ lack of clarity concerning their wartime memories.”

— John Irving

365. “They resembled an elderly, long-married couple – devoted to each other without conversation.”

— John Irving

366. “There is often a defining experience that marks any significant change in the course of a person’s life.”

— John Irving

367. “Lies of omission count as lies, sweetie – they can be the worst ones.”

— John Irving

368. “I just don’t dare to make up everything, like you do.” I don’t make up everything, but when I use things that actually happened, I always change something; I try to make what happens not exactly true.”

— John Irving

369. “Of course, I was not yet born when my mother told her parents she was pregnant.”

— John Irving

370. “Elliot told me that bigots could be “slippery” if you accused them outright.”

— John Irving

371. “There’s a reason we’re fiction writers, you know – real life sucks; make-believe is our business,” I try to tell her.”

— John Irving

372. “I’d been a writer long enough to sense when someone has the soul of a reader – like a poor cowboy, who’s not had much opportunity to read.”

— John Irving

373. “Reading good novels can make almost anything seem imaginable.”

— John Irving

374. “The past is everlasting.”

— John Irving

375. “Readers vary, when it comes to having the imagination to enjoy a story outside their own experiences.”

— John Irving

376. “Okay,” I said. There are these moments when you see the course of your life unfolding, and you feel powerless to alter it.”

— John Irving

377. “Even I knew better than to sleep with a ghost. And it was the wrong time for a moral dilemma.”

— John Irving

378. “This is the way confessing works – once you start, you can’t stop.”

— John Irving

379. “It sounds the same to me, Kid,” Molly said. “The new lift takes you to the same old place. It’s the same trip, just a faster ride – it’s no more or less depressing than it ever was,” she added.”

— John Irving

380. “It was as if all the books in her room had been feeding on her, had consumed – not nourished – her.”

— John Irving

381. “As Em would one day act out for me, pantomimists are always misquoted.”

— John Irving

382. “Greene’s writing – he was the first modern writer I liked. Before Greene, my heroes were all novelists from the nineteenth century. Living in the nineteenth century can expand your loneliness; as a writer, it’s lonely living there.”

— John Irving

383. “Adam, we can’t make being safe the guiding principle of our lives. We have to be who we are – we can only do what we do, sweetie.”

— John Irving

384. “Americans are suckers for an English accent.”

— John Irving

385. “History is composed of the smallest, often undetected mistakes.”

— John Irving

386. “If women are Republicans, they’ve been brainwashed – the men have brainwashed them,” Nana said.”

— John Irving

387. “Aren’t eccentricities fairly common among overachievers.”

— John Irving

388. “As Nora had also said, “Nothing will change.” She meant the Catholic Church and the Republicans, but – according to Em – the Republicans would get worse.”

— John Irving

389. “There was something about the Midwest in her that Wallingford loved.”

— John Irving

390. “When you write screenplays that don’t get made, you lose your sense of humor about the bad movies that do get made.”

— John Irving

391. “My mother named me Adam, like you-know-who.”

— John Irving

392. “From that moment on, he would never stop seeing her, not in his minds eye – not whenever he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. She would always be there.”

— John Irving

393. “Some readers and writers don’t look like readers or writers.”

— John Irving

394. “Reading good novels can make young readers seem more experienced about relationships than they are.”

— John Irving

395. “But you don’t see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you’ve missed.”

— John Irving