John Irving Quotes - Page 2

There's nothing as scary as the future.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.

If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.

Grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like.

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 someone else's religion practiced on us.

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

Half my life is an act of revision.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

We invent what we love and what we fear.

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

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

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.

Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.

wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.

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.

I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me.

Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.

If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.