Quotes from John Irving

No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.

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

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.

We don't enjoy giving directions in New Hampshire-we tend to think if you don't know where you're going, you don't belong where you are.

All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let's just leave them be. Don't judge them. You are not superior to them - don't put them down.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.

Love was certainly not safe - not ever.

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

It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.

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.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. (Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews , Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law-they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood!

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.

The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he'd not yet seen.

We're as common as rain." And she was right: 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; they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more.

Some producer actually told Franny that profanity revealed a poor vocabulary and a lack of imagination. And Frank and Lilly and Father and I all loved to shout at Franny, then, and ask her what she had said to that. 'What an anal crock of shit, you dumb asshole!' she'd told the producer. 'Up yours - and in your ear, too!

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.

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.

No one could have fathomed what a life he'd led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.

Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.

Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?