John Irving Quotes
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You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.
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We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
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I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.
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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
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Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
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The object of war is to survive it.
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The lie, of course, is more interesting.
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
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For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
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I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.
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All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.
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We invent what we love and what we fear.
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
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Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.
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It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
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I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front.
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Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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Ever since the Christmas of 1953, 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 who's not home.
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A part of adolescence is feelimg that there's no one else around who's enough like youself to understand you.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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...I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.
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