John Irving Quotes

American novelist and screenwriter

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John Winslow Irving (born 2 March 1942) is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter (for The Cider House Rules, based on his novel of the same name).

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Birth Name: John Wallace Blunt

Alternative Names: John Winslow Irving • John Wallace Blunt, Jr.

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It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.

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."

"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)

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

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

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.

Women know when men don’t desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death — even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them.

He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.

"Nostalgia!" Miss Frost cried. "You´re nostalgic!" She repeated. "Just how old are you, William?" She asked.

"Seventeen, " I told her.

"Seventeen!" Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. "Well, William Abbott, if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!"

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

Sorrow floats.

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

What she might have told him was that taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject; the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet.

He wanted to take Homer Wells in his arms, and hug him, and kiss him, but he could only hope that Homer understood how much Dr. Larch's self-esteem was dependent on his self-control.

I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.