John Irving Quotes

born 1942 United States

John Winslow Irving (born 2 March 1942) is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter (for The Cider House Rules, based on his novel of the same name).

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Random John Irving quote

16 quotes

You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.

A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

Until I Find You (2005)

He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you."

The World According to Garp (1978)

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

A Widow for One Year (1998)

Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean—make sure they know what they mean!

A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!

A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

The World According to Garp (1978)

Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory.

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

The Hotel New Hampshire (1981)

But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see.

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996)

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 know he was a novelist either.

Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1988)

Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1988)

A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.'

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Irving (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.