John Irving citations

“Je ne mène pas une vie de fou. Je n'ai pas besoin de "dissiper les nuages" tous les soirs, ni toutes les semaines, ni même une fois par mois. La plupart du temps, le soir, je ne regarde même pas mon téléphone. D'autres fois pourtant, cet appareil semble convoquer tous les gens injoignables de mon passé. […] Tel est le téléphone, certains soirs : le passé injoignable, les morts qui réclament de donner leur avis.”

“[…] l’art du romancier est la capacité d’imaginer de façon vraie.”

“L'un de ses détracteurs ayant affirmé que ce qu'il faisait ne plaisait sûrement pas à Dieu, Mauriac eut cette réponse admirable : "Dieu, monsieur, se soucie peu de ce que nous écrivons; mais lorsque c'est bien écrit, il s'en sert."”

“Eric [Ross] et moi […] n'avons pas aimé et n'aimons toujours pas Vienne. C'est une petite ville; son antisémitisme notoire n'est qu'un aspect parmi d'autres de son provincialisme mesquin, où règne une xénophobie généralisée, une défiance qui peut aller jusqu'à la haine de tous les éléments extérieurs. "Des geht bei uns nicht", disent les Autrichiens. "Cela ne s'accorde pas avec nous". le mot Ausländer, étranger, y est toujours péjoratif. Quant à la Gemütlichkeit viennoise, c'est une attraction touristique, la fausse gentillesse d'un peuple fondamentalement unhöflich.”

“Eric et moi, jeunes Américains idéalistes, ne pouvions rien faire de plus que de tendre un miroir à cette inexplicable tolérance de l'intolérance.”

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. 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!”

“The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.”

“Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean—make sure they know what they mean!”

“The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.”

“It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.”

““People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.””

“You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life”

“You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”

“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.”

“To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.”

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

“My life is a reading list.”

“Keep passing the open windows.”

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

“Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.”

“Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.”

“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.”

“Imagining something is better than remembering something.”

“Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.”

“A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy”

“In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”

“It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.”

“When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?”

“The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again. The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you—just watching you, waiting for you to wake up.”

“You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.”

“Life is serious but art is fun!”

“If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.”

“…the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself.”

“… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.”