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.
What is the most famous quote by John Irving ?
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
— John Irving
What can you learn from John Irving (Life Lessons)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
The most sensual John Irving quotes that may be undiscovered and unusual
Following is a list of the best quotes, including various John Irving inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by John Irving.
Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
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.
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.
Keep passing the open windows.
Half my life is an act of revision.
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.
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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.
Fantastical quotes by John Irving
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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!
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.
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.
Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims.
As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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.
Quotations by John Irving that are quirky and emotional
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.
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.
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.
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?
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.
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
Our memory is a monster; you forget it - it does not.
My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
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
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.
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
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.
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
You think you have a memory; but it has you!
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.
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean - make sure they know what they mean!
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.
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.