110+ John Irving Quotes On Fantastical, Quirky And Emotional

John Irving is an American novelist known for his complex and often surreal stories. He is best known for his 1978 novel The World According to Garp, which was later adapted into a film. His other works include The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Following is our collection on famous quotes by John Irving on love, fantastical, quirky.

Top 10 John Irving Quotes

1. If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
2. Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
3. 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.
4. Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.
5. Keep passing the open windows.
6. Half my life is an act of revision.
7. If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.
8. You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
9. We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
10. Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.

John Irving Image Quotes

Keep passing the open windows. — John Irving

Half my life is an act of revision. — John Irving

John Irving Short Quotes

• The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
• Imagining something is better than remembering something.
• Our memory is a monster; you forget it - it does not.
• In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
• but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
• A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
• My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
• but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
• You think you have a memory; but it has you!
• When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.

John Irving Quotes About Love

All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete. — John Irving

If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind? — John Irving

Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love. — John Irving

We invent what we love and what we fear. — John Irving

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination. — John Irving

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears. — John Irving

Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us? — John Irving

…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus. — John Irving

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. — John Irving

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes. — John Irving

John Irving Quotes About Life

You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life — John Irving

You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends. — John Irving

You live your life at the time you live it -- you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening. — John Irving

Life is an X-rated soap opera. — John Irving

… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human. — John Irving

Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes. — John Irving

Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose. — John Irving

I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, "I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure." It doesn't bother me if people feel that way. — John Irving

If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life. — John Irving

… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life. — John Irving

John Irving Quotes About Simply

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! — John Irving

A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed. — John Irving

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 will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you! — John Irving

John Irving Famous Quotes And Sayings

Keep passing the open windows. — John Irving

Half my life is an act of revision. — John Irving

Anyone can be sentimental about the nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer." “If you don’t believe in Easter,” Owen Meany said. “Don’t kid yourself—Don’t call yourself a Christian. — John Irving

I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me. — John Irving

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. — John Irving

It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change. — John Irving

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. — John Irving

I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range. — John Irving

Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong? — John Irving

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything. — John Irving

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes. — John Irving

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences. — John Irving

Grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like. — John Irving

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part. — John Irving

I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds. — John Irving

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. — John Irving

Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them. — John Irving

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. — John Irving

Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean - make sure they know what they mean! — John Irving

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography. — John Irving

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax. — John Irving

I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand. — John Irving

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is. — John Irving

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with. — John Irving

The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child. — John Irving

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. — John Irving

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. — John Irving

Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading. — John Irving

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough. — John Irving

Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either — John Irving

It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination. — John Irving

I'm not typing. I write only by longhand. I've always written first drafts by hand and then once I was into a second or third draft I wrote insert pages on a typewriter. But I got rid of all my typewriters about three or four novels ago and now I do everything by hand. I write by hand because it makes me go slow and going slow is what I like. — John Irving

When you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion. — John Irving

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

The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again. The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you—just watching you, waiting for you to wake up. — John Irving

The thing that is most hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most wind up in parentheses. — John Irving

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for? — John Irving

I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen. — John Irving

I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost; he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed; and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany. — John Irving

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep. — John Irving

It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived. — John Irving

People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it. — John Irving

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane. — John Irving

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness. — John Irving

This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends. — John Irving

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy — John Irving

Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness. — John Irving

You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it. — John Irving

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. — John Irving

The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen. — John Irving

O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You. — John Irving

YOU LET ME DROWN!” Owen said. “YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he told us. “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE. — John Irving

I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful. — John Irving

We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it - and reward it in all manner of ways. — John Irving

When people say that German or any other language is romantic... all they really mean is that they've enjoyed a past in the language — John Irving

Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie. — John Irving

I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible. — John Irving

He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him. — John Irving

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss. — John Irving

There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old. — John Irving

A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly. — John Irving

It seems to me that a great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour. — John Irving

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can. — John Irving

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have. — John Irving

(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action — John Irving

Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose. — John Irving

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all. — John Irving

What a phrase that is: 'that explains everything!' I know better than to think anything 'explains everything' today. — John Irving

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me. — John Irving

Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country! — John Irving

when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is always going to be trouble. — John Irving

If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves. — John Irving

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had. — John Irving

It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules. — John Irving

The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist. — John Irving

In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice. — John Irving

I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character. — John Irving

Life Lessons by John Irving

1. John Irving's works often emphasize the importance of resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity. He encourages readers to be true to themselves and to never give up on their dreams, no matter how difficult the journey may be.
2. Irving also emphasizes the power of storytelling, both as a means of understanding the world and as a way to make sense of our own lives. He encourages readers to explore their own stories and to share them with others.
3. Finally, Irving's works often explore the complexities of relationships and the importance of forgiveness and compassion. He encourages readers to be open to understanding different perspectives and to always strive for empathy.