No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen…You shouldn’t have a baby if there’s no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
JOHN IRVINGThe unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
More John Irving Quotes
-
-
I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
JOHN IRVING -
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
JOHN IRVING -
If pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.
JOHN IRVING -
I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.
JOHN IRVING -
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can’t even remember having met you
JOHN IRVING -
It doesn’t really matter who said it – it’s so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
JOHN IRVING -
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING -
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too.
JOHN IRVING -
Keep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVING -
Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
JOHN IRVING -
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, “I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure.” It doesn’t bother me if people feel that way.
JOHN IRVING -
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
JOHN IRVING -
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
JOHN IRVING -
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
JOHN IRVING -
The lie, of course, is more interesting.
JOHN IRVING -
It’s a no-win argument – that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
JOHN IRVING -
I don’t begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
JOHN IRVING -
The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
JOHN IRVING -
Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.
JOHN IRVING -
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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!
JOHN IRVING -
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
JOHN IRVING -
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVING -
I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.
JOHN IRVING -
There’s nothing as scary as the future.
JOHN IRVING -
Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don’t mean that you can’t also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.
JOHN IRVING