John Irving quotes - page 4

This is a writer's lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all. (John Irving)
This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on. View quote
John Irving
Being wrong about important things is exhausting. View quote
John Irving
...there is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old... View quote
John Irving
As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry. View quote
John Irving
...there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus. View quote
John Irving
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently. View quote
John Irving
(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action. View quote
John Irving
If pride is a sin... moral pride is the greatest sin. View quote
John Irving
You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror... But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace. View quote
John Irving
Don't you understand?” he would say, "You imagine the story better than I remember it. (John Irving)
Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met. View quote
John Irving
The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today ... they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy! View quote
John Irving
Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory. View quote
John Irving
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. View quote
John Irving
I write repeatedly-against my will-of those things I fear most happening. Losing a loved one, losing a parent, losing a child. I'm in terror of losing a child. It's never happened to me, but I am clearly compelled to write about it over and over again, and in a way I think, psychologically at least, this says more about me autobiographically as a novelist than the fact that Danny Angel goes to the Iowa Writers Workshop and has Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher, which I also did. View quote
John Irving
You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life. View quote
John Irving
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 the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive. View quote
John Irving
If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough. View quote
John Irving
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product. View quote
John Irving
It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them. (John Irving)
Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue. View quote
John Irving
I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness, things being one day here and the next day not; a sense anything could happen. Then, all of a sudden, my mother met my stepfather, and her life became happier, and my life changed, my name changed. View quote
John Irving
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything. View quote
John Irving
...the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself. View quote
John Irving