John Irving Quotes

Oh FUCK the longings and agonies of youth.

No touching Baby Jesus.”
“But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation.
“Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume.

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.

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

Someone who hasn't read a novel doesn't really know what it's about, William.

...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around who's enough like yourself to understand you.

There's nothing as scary as the future.

Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.

Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.

...the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve.

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

The day women stop reading — that’s the day the novel dies!

"I want to go on being a student," I told him. "I want to be a teacher. I'm just a reader," I said.

"DON'T SOUND SO ASHAMED," he said. "READING IS A GIFT."

"I learned it from you," I told him.

"IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. 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."

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.