Quotes by John Irving

It doesnt really matter who said it - its so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy

When someone you love dies, and youre not expecting it, you dont 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 theres a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that shes gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

Life, Garp wrote, is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement, said the sorrowful girl. What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties., Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

A persons faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?

You cant learn everything you need to know legally.

The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.

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 ei

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard. Because you often feel like interfering—you want to be the one who makes the plans. . . You can’t protect people, kiddo, all you can do is love them.

Life is serious but art is fun!

Half my life is an act of revision.

IT (The country) IS HEADED TOWARD OVERSIMPLIFICATION. YOU WANT TO SEE A PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE? TURN ON ANY TELEVISION ON ANY SUNDAY MORNING - FIND ONE OF THOSE HOLY ROLLERS: THATS HIM, THATS THE NEW MISTER PRESIDENT! AND DO YOU WANT TO SEE THE FUTURE OF ALL THOSE KIDS WHO ARE GOING TO FALL IN THE CRACKS OF THIS GREAT, BIG, SLOPPY SOCIETY OF OURS? I JUST MET HIM; HES A TALL, SKINNY, FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY NAMED DICK. HES PRETTY SCARY. WHATS WRONG WITH HIM IS NOT UNLIKE WHATS WRONG WITH THE TV EVANGELIST - OUR FUTURE PRESIDENT. WHATS WRONG WITH BOTH OF THEM IS THAT THEYRE SO SURE THEYRE RIGHT! THATS PRETTY SCARY - THE FUTURE, I THINK, IS PRETTY SCARY.

Here is the trap you are in.... And its not my trap—I havent trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every womans freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, youre trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.

People are like that .... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.’ And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety -- it stands alongside our sameness.