Quotes from John Irving

there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

This is a writer's lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

Here in St. Cloud's," Dr. Larch wrote, " I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won't be may

Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.

but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.

You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.

As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.

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

It's natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you can't interfere with people you love anymore than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know.

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

Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.

There are always suicides, Garp wrote, among people who are unable to say what they mean.

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.

Don't you understand?" he would say, "You imagine the story better than I remember it.

But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

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.

MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT'S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE! YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON'T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE - TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. IT'S SO EASY!; I THINK THAT'S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS!

Grant us safe lodging, and holy rest," Mrs. Grogan was saying, "and peace at last." Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the Saint of St. Cloud's, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he'd come a long way and still had a long way to go.

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.

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)

If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.

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.

Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.