Quotes from John Irving

IF YOU ABOLISH THE DRAFT, said Owen Meany, MOST AMERICANS WILL SIMPLY STOP CARING WHAT WE'RE DOING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD

Any contractor who would construct a flat-roofed, two-storey building in Northern New Hampshire was enough of a moron to not know how many assholes a human being had.

Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.

Most men don't mind if another woman watches. It's the women who are watching who don't want to be seen.

Behind every journey is a reason

The chairman of the state board of medical examiners was a retired physician who thought that President Teddy Roosevelt was the only other man in the world besides himself who had not been made from a banana.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about the penis word.

the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.

There's nothing so confusing as finding out that you don't know someone you thought you knew.

What worse awareness is there than to know there would have been a better outcome if you'd never done anything at all?

Why do you guys want to take all the mystery away? Isn't the mystery an exciting part of sex?

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.

If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write

Once again, Jack reached for her hand. It was the only thing he knew how to do. As it would turn out, it was about the only thing he reall knew.

It surprised him that she was the one who looked stricken with fear, as if she were a prisoner in the passenger seat and saw the fast-approaching collision seconds before the drive could react to it. Bonnie pinched her lower lip with her teeth and stared at Jack as if she were transfixed--as if he were the upcoming accident, and, even though she saw him coming, she couldn't turn away.

You are my work of art, Wilbur Larch told Homer Wells. Everything else has just been a job. I don't know if you've got a work of art in you, Larch concluded in his letter to Homer, but I know what your job is,and you know what it is, too.

And when Dr. Daruwalla breathed in her dangerous aroma, he thought he'd at last identified the smell of sex, which struck him as an earthy commingling of death and flowers

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show, he recited from memory.

We aren't eccentric, we're not bizarre. To each other, we're 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.

What we witnessed with the death of Kennedy was the triumph of television; what we saw with his assassination, and with his funeral, was the beginning of television's dominance of our culture-- for television is at its most solemnly self-serving and at its mesmerizing best when it is depicting the untimely deaths of the chosen and the golden. It is as witness to the butchery of heroes in their prime-- and of all holy-seeming innocents-- that televisions achieves its deplorable greatness.

Homer Wells was in Wally's room, reading David Copperfield and thinking about Heaven – '…that sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on earth, and tell her what the strife had been within me when I loved her here.' I think I would prefer to love Candy here, 'on earth,' Homer Wells was thinking – when Olive interrupted them.

She drew the line at television. It took no effort to watch – it was infinitely more beneficial to the soul, and to the intelligence, to read or to listen – and what she imagined there was on TV appalled her.

It is simply amazing, at that age, when you're thirteen or fourteen, how you can take being loved for granted, how (even when you are wanted) you can feel utterly alone.