Quotes by John Irving

No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldnt have a baby if theres no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.

You cant possibly know that youre going to be a writer! Miss Frost said. Its not a career choice.

Six-Pack didnt despise George W. Bush to the degree that Ketchum did, but she thought the president was a smirking twerp and a dumbed-down daddys boy, and she agreed with Ketchums assessment that Bush would be as worthless as wet crap in even the smallest crisis. If a fight broke out between two small dogs, for example, Ketchum claimed that Bush would call the fire department and ask them to bring a hose; then the president would position himself at a safe distance from the dogfight, and wait for the firemen to show up. The part Pam liked best about this assessment was that Ketchum said the president would instantly look self-important, and would appear to be actively involved--that is, once the firefighters and their hose arrived, and provided there was anything remaining of the mess the two dogs might have made of each other in the interim.

A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter -- it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood -- they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having ‘higher purposes.’ A terrorist is a pornographer.

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

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they cant turn you away.

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.

Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.

...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

Ruth knew very well what the killer thought he had heard: hed heard the sound of someone trying not to make a sound - thats what hed heard.

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: 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. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didnt, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasnt much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo.

Ill bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!

I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesnt travel very far.What stuff is that? hed asked her.Were completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads, shed told him. Maybe thats part of what being a writer entails, Danny Baciagalupo found himself thinking on that rainy spring night in Iowa city.

At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasnt as important as his usefulness.

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.