Quotes from John Irving

It was his first understanding that physical attraction, even sexual desire, was stimulated by more than the perfection of a body, or the beauty of a face.

Every misunderstanding has at its center a breakdown of language.

They were William Blake's words, set to song

If you can't forgive your mother, Jack, you'll never be free of her. It's for your own sake, you know – for your soul. When you forgive someone who's hurt you, it's like escaping your skin – you're that free, outside yourself, where you can see everything.

for a novelist, in Candy's opinion, was also a kind of impostor doctor, but a good doctor nonetheless.

I could find him every noon, sitting on a bench in the Rathaus Park with a small, fat bag of hothouse radishes in his lap and a bottle of beer in one hand.

There is no Purgatory-that's a catholic invention. There's life on earth, There's heaven-and there's hell

It's bullshit that those two had no known illnesses—they had sexual intolerance up the wazoo!" Nora was raving. "They had incurable hatred of sexual differences!" Nora shouted.

BELIEF IS NOT AN INTELLECTUAL MATTER," he complained. "IF HE'S GOT SO MUCH DOUBT, HE'S IN THE WRONG BUSINESS.

Tell your mom he said, 'Sibelius.' It's all he thinks about. I mean going there," she added.

If an orphan is not adopted by the time he reaches this alarming period of adolescence, he may continue to deceive himself, and others forever. "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.

ONE DAY THERE WILL COME AN EPIDEMIC

Autobiography just isn't good or bad enough to work as fiction… Unrevised, real life is just a mess.

There are many unintentionally cruel talents that the world, indiscriminately, hands out to us. Whether we can use these gifts we never asked for is not the worlds concern.

rape, Garp thought, made men feel guilty by association.

I remember you as a little boy," she told me, not long ago, "but when I look at you now, I don't know who you are." I told her I occasionally had the same feeling about myself.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON'T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE—TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. IT'S SO EASY; I THINK THAT'S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS

She was so angry, she struck the cool, viscid thigh of Oren Rath. After she had lived through this, now there was a fucking tornado, too!

statuesque,'" my aunt had

The past was where he lived most confidently, and with the surest sense of knowing who he was—not only as a novelist.

He's from Finland," Alice explained. "That means your father has gone to Helsinki, Jack.

it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn't big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away – of herself.

Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

You think you have a memory; but it has you! Later