John Irving
50 quotes
Biography
John Winslow Irving is an American and Canadian novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter.
"If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it."
"My life is a reading list."
"It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious."
"In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me"
"It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans."
"It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change."
"O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You."
"Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole."
"You can't learn everything you need to know legally."
"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."(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)"
"Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement,'"said the sorrowful girl. "'What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives."
"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.""
"Imagining something is better than remembering something."
"Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory."
"In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases."
"Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual."
"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!"
"Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean—make sure they know what they mean!"
"The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!"
"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."
"Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can."
"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."
"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.'"
"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."
"This is Marxism. It's leveling everything by decimating what works ... It's that vindictive 'We've suffered, and now we're going to take money from your kid and watch you squirm'... There's a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that's rich people."