John Irving Quotes

243 quotes in 2839 categories

• We invent what we love and what we fear.
• I feel more a part of the wrestling community than I feel I belong to the community of arts and letters. Why? Because wrestling requires…
• A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
• It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want…
• A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the…
• My life as a writer consists of 1/8 talent and 7/8 discipline.
• Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the…
• Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean––make sure they know what they mean!
• I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often…
• But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
• Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
• Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
• Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or…
• The object of war is to survive it.
• Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are…
• When people say that German or any other language is romantic... all they really mean is that they've enjoyed a past in the language
• A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
• Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no…
• What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
• A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.

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