Quotes from John Irving

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

Ah, well... I started to say, and then stopped. So that was where he was going; I'd heard it before. Richard had told me that I'd not been standing in my mother's shoes in 1942, when I was born; he'd said I couldn't, or shouldn't, judge her. It was my not forgiving her that irked him-it was my intolerance of her intolerance that bugged him.

Meaning Michael Milton; meaning the whole thing.

According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.

return trips, to this day...are simply invitations to dull trances or leaden slumber

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it—perhaps your favorite sentence—to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

but you live your life at the time you live it—you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.

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.

If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it's dark; he'd lose the ball.

They were members of Maine's very small money class. Their business, as they ridiculously called it, didn't make a cent, but they didn't need to make money; they were born rich. Their needless enterprise consisted of taking people to the wilderness and creating for them the sensation that they were lost there; they also took people shooting down rapids in frail rafts or canoes, creating for them the sensation that they would surely be bashed to death before they drowned.

Aber das ist es nun mal, was wir tun: wir träumen weiter gegen den Strom und unsere Träume entschlüpfen uns fast so lebendig, wie wir sie heraufbeschwören können.

He hadn't known many British, but some of them seemed crazy to him, and so it seemed a small thing to agree to—and Wally thought it was wise to agree with whoever it was who held the catheter.

For a terrible time of life a teen-ager deceives himself; he believes he can trick the world. He believes he is invulnerable. An adolescent who is an orphan at this phase is in danger of never growing up.

Vielleicht muss es im Leben eines Schriftstellers diesen Augenblick geben, in dem ein anderer Schriftsteller beschuldigt wird, seinen Beruf verfehlt zu haben.

It's hard to pretend to be born without causing offense.

This is the way confessing works—once you start, you can't stop.

We can afford the workers' compensation, Harry—he'll watch what he says the time next, won't he?" Nils would say. "The 'next time,' Nils," Grandpa Harry would gently correct his old friend.

He might have told Homer, then, that he loved him very much and that he needed something very active to occupy himself at this moment of Homer's departure.

When the lies of omission unravel, so does the story.

Some readers and writers don't look like readers or writers.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam—to the greater glory of God.

I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sheets and cuts the pasta into any shape you want. It's important to have toys like that, if you live in Maine.

If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something—just by staying alive.

The snowshoer had written about Reagan—just one sentence, after seeing her friends who were dying of AIDS. "If or when there's another plague, I hope America has a better plague president than Ronald Reagan," the little English teacher wrote.