Quotes from John Irving

I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.

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 will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

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 will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

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

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

Keep passing the open windows.

My life is a reading list.

We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.

Never confuse faith, or belief—of any kind—with something even remotely intellectual.

The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.

People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

it's not god who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in him and who claim to pursue their ends in his holy name.

Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.

It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans.

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy