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John Irving Quotes
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John Winslow Irving is an American novelist and screenwriter.

Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. Many of Irving's novels, including The Cider House Rules , A Prayer for Owen Meany , and A Widow for One Year have been bestsellers. Five of his novels have been adapted into films. Several of Irving's books and short stories have been set in and around Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999 for his script The Cider House Rules.

✵ 2. March 1942  •  Other names Irving
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John Irving: 97 quotes15 likes

John Irving Quotes

“This is a writer’s lesson:
To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.”

John Irving book Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

Source: Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

“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.”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“You can't learn everything you need to know legally.”

John Irving book A Widow for One Year

Source: A Widow for One Year (1998), part II, ch. 7

“Being wrong about important things is exhausting.”

John Irving book The Cider House Rules

Source: The Cider House Rules

“As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.”

John Irving book The Cider House Rules

Source: The Cider House Rules

“…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.”

John Irving book The Cider House Rules

Source: The Cider House Rules

“I think about you more and more, but I don't waste my time - or yours - thinking about who you were before I knew you.”

John Irving book The Cider House Rules

Source: The Cider House Rules

“(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.”

John Irving book The World According to Garp

Source: The World According to Garp

“If pride is a sin… moral pride is the greatest sin.”

John Irving book The Cider House Rules

Source: The Cider House Rules

“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.”

John Irving book Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

Source: Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

“Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.”

John Irving book The Hotel New Hampshire

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

“A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.”

John Irving

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“[On his process for writing novels:] I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.”

John Irving

A modern novelist of Dickensian tradition, Spotlight, Russia Today, January 24, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ost0Gyl2V1I,

“The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

“He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you."”

John Irving book The World According to Garp

The World According to Garp (1978), ch. 5

“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 either.”

John Irving

Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1988)

“Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student—and not a good one—and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved.”

John Irving

"John Irving Interviewed by Suzanne Herel." Mother Jones magazine, May/June 1997.

“I write repeatedly—against my will—of those things I fear most happening. Losing a loved one, losing a parent, losing a child. I'm in terror of losing a child. It's never happened to me, but I am clearly compelled to write about it over and over again, and in a way I think, psychologically at least, this says more about me autobiographically as a novelist than the fact that Danny Angel goes to the Iowa Writers Workshop and has Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher, which I also did.”

John Irving

The Best of The Sunday Edition, CBC.ca, CBC, Michael Enright, October 25, 2009, November 5, 2009 http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/sundayedition_20091026_22073.mp3,

“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”

John Irving

Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1988)

“But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see.”

John Irving

A Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996)