Quotes from John Irving

When you lie, it makes you feel in charge of your life. Telling lies is very seductive to orphans. I know because I tell them, too. I love to lie. When you lie, you feel as if you have cheated fate - your own, and everybody else's.

INTO PARADISE MAY THE ANGELS LEAD YOU,'" he'd said over my mother's grave; and so I say that one for him—I know it was one of his favorites. I am always saying prayers for Owen Meany. And

There was a twofold awkwardness attached to Juan Diego's attempts to have sex with the life-size Guadalupe doll—better said, the awkwardness of Juan Diego's imagining he was having sex with the plastic virgin.

There is no excuse for cruelty, but--at an orphanage--perhaps we are obliged to withhold love; if you fail to withhold love at an orphanage, you will create an orphanage that no orphan will willingly leave. You will create a Homer Wells--a true orphan, because his only home will always be at St. Cloud's.

A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct of philanthropy

It was as if all the books in her room had been feeding on her, had consumed – not nourished – her.

There is at least one terrible thing about lovers – real lovers, I mean: people who are in love with each other, even then they will relish their every physical contact in a sexual way; even when they're supposed to be in a kind of mourning, they can get aroused. Franny and I simply couldn't have gone on holding each other on the stairs: it was impossible to touch each other, at all, and not want to touch everything.

it struck him as a brilliant accusation to make of anyone who was slightly (or hugely) different. It was the best rumor to start about anyone because it could never be proved or disproved.

Love also floats. And, that being true, love probably resembles Sorrow in other ways.

Here come the characters who comprise the movie vermin, the Hollywood scum, the film slime—the aforementioned "unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity." Fortunately, they are minor characters, yet so distasteful that their introduction has been delayed as long as possible.

I must part with you for my whole life, she read, with horror. I must begin a new existence amongst strange faces and strange scenes. The truth of that closed the book for her, forever.

We tend to think that if you don't know where you're goin, you don't belong where you are.

In schools—even in good schools, like Exeter—they tend to teach the shorter books by the great authors; at least they begin with those. Thus it was Billy Budd, Sailor that introduced me to Melville, which led me to the library, where I discovered Moby Dick on my own.

Don't ever die, Juan Diego had written to Brother Pepe from Iowa City. What Juan Diego meant was that HE would die if he lost Pepe.

Don't grown-ups ever get over things?

First chapter ain't so bad, Jillsy said. That first chapter ain't nothin'. It's that nineteenth chapter that got me, Jillsy said. Lawd, Lawd! she crowed. You read nineteen chapters? John Wolf asked. You didn't give me no more than nineteen chapters, Jillsy said. Jesus Lawd, is there another chapter? Do they keep goin' on? No, no, John Wolf said. that's the end of it. That's all there is.

Wizened and white, with brown blotched on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.

Most of you know who I am, he whispered. Duncan was sleep, but Helen overheard him; she reached across the aisle and held Garp's hand. Thousands of feet above sea level, T. S. Garp cried in the airplane that was bringing him home to be famous in his violent country.

I just don't dare to make up everything, like you do." I don't make up everything, but when I use things that actually happened, I always change something; I try to make what happens not exactly true.

worst of all were the highly unlikely science-fiction novels, or the equally implausible futuristic tales. Couldn't my mom and Nana Victoria see for themselves that I was both mystified and frightened by life on Earth?

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo.

And you wouldn't want to bring her home—at least not to entertain your guests or amuse the children. No, Juan Diego thought—you would want to keep her, all for yourself.

Importantly, it was in this out north to Steering, with the real Ellen James sleep and in his care, that T. S. Garp decided he would try to be more like his mother, Jenny Fields. A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.

Ruth knew very well what the killer thought he had heard: he'd heard the sound of someone trying not to make a sound - that's what he'd heard.