Quotes from John Irving

Women know when men don't desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death—even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them.

An affection that was calculated was never trustworthy.

Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!

That's okay, I said. We're writers. We make things up.

But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.

That's what I love about boys," Marion told him. "No matter what, you just go about your business.

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.

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. ''I lost one, too,'' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

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

ARE THEY ESPECIALLY WILD?

Jenny Fields felt undone, the way only a person who has been careful can feel when confronted by a mistake.

he smoked so much marijuana that his hair smelled like a cupboard crammed with oregano;

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

where our desires come from; that is a dark, winding road.

If you're God's instrument, Owen, I said, how come you need my help to stuff a basketball?

It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.

You've witnessed what you c-c-c-call a miracle and now you believe-you believe everything, Pastor Merrill said. But miracles don't c-c-c-cause belief-real miracles don't m-m-m-make faith out of thin air; you have to already have faith in order to believe in real miracles.

but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

You don't sound very well Owen. I pointed out to him. IF JESUS HAD TO BE BORN ON A DAY LIKE THIS. I DON'T THINK HE'D HAVE LASTED LONG ENOUGH TO BE CRUCIFIED. Owen said.

As for Jenny, she felt only that women - just like men - should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.

Isn't it amazing? The Americans have so many good afterthoughts!

Moreover, there was what Amy called "the cocksuckers' contingent of the country"—what Danny knew as the dumber-than-dog-shit element, those bully patriots—and they were too set in their ways or too poorly educated (or both) to see beyond the ceaseless flag-waving and nationalistic bluster.

I'll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!

the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve.