Quotes from John Irving

IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST! (page 286)

Clothes, whips, reading material," the customs officer had summarized, in Spanish and English, to the young American. "Just the bare essentials!" Edward Bonshaw

for a brief phase, you were expected to absorb love (and get enough), and then, for a much longer and more serious phase, you were expected to fulfill certain obligations

It was Wilbur Larch who was the first man in Maine to call a television what it was: an idiot box.

Thirty today, I saw The trees flare briefly like The candles upon a cake As the sun went down the sky, A momentary flash, Yet there was time to wish Before the light could die, If I had known what to wish, As once I must have known, Bending above the clean, Candlelit tablecloth To blow them out with a breath.

The only question that I wanted to ask the darkness was the one question Scrooge had also wanted an answer to: "'Are these the shadows of the things that Will be or are they shadows of the things that May be, only?'" But the Ghost of the Future was not answering.

Okay," I said. I still have that photograph, though I don't like remembering any part of the day Carlton Delacorte died.

Tobit—the one that goes, "That she and I may grow old together.

Owen Meany, who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water … remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain, untouchable … Owen said to me once, "YOUR MOTHER IS SO SEXY, I KEEP FORGETTING SHE'S ANYBODY'S MOTHER.

Adolescence. Is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?

Then he looked only at me. "YOU'RE GETTING SMALLER, BUT I CAN STILL SEE YOU!" said Owen Meany. Then

Hello, my name is Beth. I'm an Ellen Jamesian. And Garp would give her this: Hello, my name is Garp. I have a broken jaw.

You are never over your childhood, not until

The good gringo asked Lupe if she forgave him for sleeping with her mother. "Yes," Lupe said, "but we can't ever get married.

I later found a bookstore on the Calle de Gravina—Libros, I believe it was called. (I'm not kidding, a bookstore called "Books.")

the memoir-novel "dumbed down fiction and traduced

What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don't mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don't want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don't mind if their presidents deceive Congress—lie to the people and violate the people's constitution!

But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That's what happens, like it or not.

His childhood, and the people he'd encountered there—the ones who'd changed his life, or who'd been witnesses to what had happened to him at that crucial time—were what Juan Diego had instead of religion.

In the company of grown women among whom Jack remembered being a little boy, he was again a child.

OH, PLANS, PLANS, PLANS—how we make plans into the future, as if the future will most certainly be there!

She was intimidating to me in the way someone who never remembers your name can be intimidating. 'In this world,' Franny once observed, 'just when you're trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that they've met you.

The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.

My God," Franny would say later. "They would bring their daughter to see a murder, but they wouldn't even let her hear about an orgasm. Americans sure are strange.