All John Irving Quotes
- I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens.… Actual
- I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a… Been
- No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years… Adult
- Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't… All
- When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life… Almost Like
- You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else.… Able
- Imagining something is better than remembering something. Better
- What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses. Accept
- The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist. Clearly
- Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having… Choice
- If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind? Crudeness
- It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because… Argument
- It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such… Amazing
- There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and… Abandoned
- 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… Better
- If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes… Alive
- She felt detached from her family, and thought it strange how they had lavished so much attention on her, as a child, and then at… Absorb
- You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all… All
- A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as… Clothed
- Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare. Adults