John Irving Quotes

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

Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.

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."

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield)

“But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect — and their meaning was unknown — but they were there.

You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them… That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that’s what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear… Coach Bob knew it all along: you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows.

You know what I love... everything.

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.

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

Hang in there, Frank!' Freud called - to the entire lobby. 'Don't let anyone tell you you're queer! You're a prince, Frank!' Freud cried. 'You're better than Rudolf!' Freud yelled to Frank. 'You're more majestic than all the Hapsburgs, Frank!' Freud encouraged him. Frank couldn't speak, he was crying so hard.

If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write,

It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability — there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material — but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?

"If you're God's instrument, Owen," I said, "how come you need my help to stuff a basketball?"

"Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic."

It was Nurse Caroline who introduced Homer to young Dr. Harlow, who was in the throes of growing out his bangs; a cowlick persisted in making his forehead look meager; a floppy shelf of straw-colored hair gave Dr. Harlow’s eyes the constant anxiousness of someone peering from under the brim of a hat.
‘Oh yes, Wells – our ether expert,’ Dr. Harlow said snidely.
‘I grew up in an orphanage,’ said Homer Wells. ‘I did a lot of helping out around the hospital.’
‘But surely you never administered any ether?’ said Dr. Harlow.
‘Surely not,’ lied Homer Wells. As Dr. Larch had discovered with the board of trustees, it was especially gratifying to lie to unlikable people.