John Irving Quotes

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.

Keep passing the open windows.

If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.

We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

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!

The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.

We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .

And never forget, there is memory.

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.

I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.

We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

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

It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.

We are formed by what we desire

Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.