John Irving Quotes

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.

...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.

The history of a city was like the history of a family — there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

...friends were more important than lovers - not least for the fact that friendships generally lasted longer than relationships.

It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.

From Hester’s bedroom — even though the door was closed — we could hear her breathing; Hester’s breathing, when she’d been drinking, was something between a snore and a moan. “Why does she drink so much?” I asked Owen. “HESTER’S AHEAD OF HER TIME,” he said. “What’s that mean?” I asked him. “Do we have a generation of drunks to look forward to?” “WE HAVE A GENERATION OF PEOPLE WHO ARE ANGRY TO LOOK FORWARD TO,” Owen said. “AND MAYBE TWO GENERATIONS OF PEOPLE WHO DON’T GIVE A SHIT,” he added. “How do you know?” I asked him. “I DON’T KNOW HOW I KNOW,” said Owen Meany. “I JUST KNOW THAT I KNOW,” he said.

We’re as common as rain.” And she was right: 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 are always logical exaggerations, nothing more.

I TRUST THAT GOD WILL HELP ME, BECAUSE WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO DO LOOKS VERY HARD.

…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

"That's okay," I said. "We're writers. We make things up."

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

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.