Quotes from 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.

My dear boy, Miss Frost said sharply. My dear boy, please don't put a label on me - don't make a category before you get to know me!

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

My brain is sending poison to my heart.

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.

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

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.

Don't get your balls crossed about it.

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.

There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.

THERE'S NO MONKEY BUSINESS ABOUT THIS ELECTION,' he told the voters. 'IF YOU'RE ENOUGH OF AN ASSHOLE TO VOTE FOR NIXON, YOUR DUMB VOTE WILL BE COUNTED––JUST LIKE ANYBODY ELSE!

A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?

Life, Garp wrote, is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

MADE FOR TELEVISION.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

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.

Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.

In this world," Franny once observed, "just as you're trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.

but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar -- you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace. My cousins were both small-towners and outsiders; they had not grown up with Own Meany, who was so strange to them that he inspired awe - yet they were no more likely to fall upon him, or to devise ways to torture him, than it was likely for a herd of cattle to attack a cat.

There's nothing as scary as the future.

He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.

The hardest thing to accept about the passage of time is that the people who mattered most to us are all wrapped up in parenthesis

A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases.

And never forget, there is memory.