John Irving citations

Page 3

“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.”

“If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough.”

“If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.”

“Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water… remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.”

“A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.”

“Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.”

“The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.”

“Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.”

“And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”

“Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.”

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

“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.”

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

“Being wrong about important things is exhausting.”

“…there is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old…”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.”

“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.”

“[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.”

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

“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."”