Quotes by John Irving

but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

Garp didnt want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesnt. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

Your memory is a monster; you forget -it doesnt. It simply files thingsaway. 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!

Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?

In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield)“But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

Keep passing the open windows.

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. Shed made a point of not looking at him!

Nostalgia! Miss Frost cried. You´re nostalgic! She repeated. Just how old are you, William? She asked.Seventeen, I told her.Seventeen! Miss Frost cried, as if shed been stabbed. Well, William Abbott, if youre nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!

According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before Id written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.

Thats okay, I said. Were writers. We make things up.

When an orphan is depressed, wrote Wilbur Larch, he is attracted to telling lies. A lie is at least a vigorous enterprise, it keeps you on your toes by making you suddenly responsible for what happens because of it. You must be alert to lie, and stay alert to keep your lie a secret. Orphans are not the masters of their fates; they are the last to believe you if you tell them that other people are also not in charge of theirs. When you lie, it makes you feel in charge of your life. Telling lies is very seductive to orphans. I know, Dr. Larch wrote. I know because I tell them, too. I love to lie. When you lie, you feel as if you have cheated fate--your own, and everybody elses.

Mothers intentions were always sound, never muddy; I dont imagine that she troubled herself to feel very guilty. But the Rev. Mr. Merrill was a man who took to wallowing in guilt; his remorse, after all, was all he had to cling to-especially after his scant courage left him, and he was forced to acknowledge that he would never be brave enough to abandon his miserable wife and children for my mother. He would continue to torture himself, of course, with the insistent and self-destructive notion that he loved my mother. I suppose that his love of my mother was as intellectually detached from feeling and action as his belief was also subject to his immense capacity for remote and unrealistic interpretation. My mother was a healthier animal; when he said he wouldnt leave his family for her, she simply put him out of her mind and went on singing.But as incapable as he was of a heartfelt response to a real situation, the Rev. Mr. Merrill was tirelessly capable of thinking; he pondered and brooded and surmised and second-guessed my mother to death.

Its because even a good man cant always be right, that we need ... rules.

MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THATS WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE! YOU DONT HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DONT NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE - TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. ITS SO EASY!; I THINK THATS WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS!

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

As Garp put it, You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else. Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions.

We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.