Quotes by John Irving

The way you remember or dream about your loved ones - the ones who are gone - you cant stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You dont get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind - in your dreams, in your memories - sometimes the story begins with the epilogue.

THATS WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY - ITS A BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERFUL MEN USE IT TO TREAT THEMSELVES TO A THRILL! THEY SAY THEY LOVE IT BUT THEY DONT MEAN IT. THEY SAY THINGS TO MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR GOOD - THEY MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR MORAL...THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOUR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEYRE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US.

WHAT IM TELLING YOU IS, IF YOU WANT TO DO THINGS YOUR OWN WAY, YOURE GOING TO HAVE TO MAKE A DECISION - YOURE GOING TO HAVE TO FIND A LITTLE COURAGE.

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.

Well, you finally got me, Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.

It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if not altogether acceptable) behavior of male writers; it would surely benefit me, as a writer, if I had the courage to seek out more of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant myself. But women who seek out such things are made to feel ashamed, or else they sound stridently ridiculous in defending themselves -- as if theyre bragging. ... Yet there are subjects that remain off-limits for women writers. Its not unlike that dichotomy which exists regarding ones sexual past: it is permissible, even attractive, for a man to have had one, but if a woman has had a sexual past, shed better keep quiet about it.

The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.

It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.

She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when youre two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.

This mannerism of what hed seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people—because, surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Clouds, criticism was plainer—and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

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.

If youre a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you cant shut it off.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didnt behave that way you would never do anything.

YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM, said Owen Meany. ITS YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHES A VICTIM; IF YOURE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHOS GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDNT YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHOS WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THATS WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING!

You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.

Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic, Richard told me. And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious.

Ever since the Christmas of 53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving--Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of whos not home.

In Ruths view, they looked like a couple because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them - they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever imagine such nonsense. (In part, it was because of her perverse ability to imagine anything that in this instance Ruth failed to imagine the obvious)

When time passes, its the people who knew you whom you want to see; theyre the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, whats it matter what they did to you?