Quotes from John Irving

It was from just a few sentences that a writer learned anything from another writer.

the surprised bookseller, whose name (inexplicably) was Mendelssohn. He was no relation to the German composer, and this Mendelssohn either overliked his last name or disliked his first so much that he never revealed it. (When Ted had once asked him his first name, Mendelssohn had said only: Not Felix.)

IF WE CAN DO IT IN UNDER FOUR SECONDS, WE CAN DO IT IN UNDER THREE," he said. "IT JUST TAKES A LITTLE MORE FAITH." "It takes more practice," I told him irritably. "FAITH TAKES PRACTICE," said Owen Meany.

Mr. Wiggin injected a kind of horror-movie element into the Christmas miracle; to the rector, every Bible story was-if properly understood-threatening.

Every time you throw a snail off the dock, Ray teased Homer Wells, you're making someone start his whole life over. Maybe I'm doing him a favor, said Homer Wells, the orphan.

What is this fascination the world has with death?

She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.

Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic, Richard told me. And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious.

It's a no-win argument—that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.

A book feels true when it feels true, she said to him, impatiently. A book's true when you can say, 'Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.

God, I think I just hit a high E-flat - and I really held it! Esmeralda said, after one of her more prolonged orgasms, but my ears were warm and sweaty, and my head had been held so tightly between her thighs that I hadn't heard anything.

Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith's opposite.

What do you think I imagine making love to a vagina would be like? Maybe like having sex with a ballroom!

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.

It was not out of love that I wanted to meet my father, but out of the darkest curiosity - to be able to recognize, in myself, what evil I might be capable of.

Juan Diego lived there, in the past—reliving, in his imagination, the losses that had marked him.

If you live long enough, Bill - it's a world of epilogues, Richard Abbott said.

in the hospital, Jenny Fields felt she was making up for lost time; she was discovering that people weren't much more mysterious, or much more attractive, than clams.

You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train—unter dem Zug.

Real life is too sloppy a model for good fiction," Juan Diego had said.

Well, you finally got me, Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.

Wallace Worthington would have reminded Wilbur Larch of someone he might have met at the Channing-Peabodys', where Dr. Larch went to perform his second abortion – the rich people's abortion, as Larch thought of it. Wallace Worthington would strike Homer Wells as what a real King of New England should look like.

JUST THINK OF THIS AS MY LITTLE GIFT TO YOU, says Owen Meany