Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
JOHN IRVINGThere’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
More John Irving Quotes
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn’t terribly painful.
JOHN IRVING -
A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
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 -
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
JOHN IRVING -
You can’t say you’re going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We – Americans – permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
JOHN IRVING -
There’s nothing as scary as the future.
JOHN IRVING -
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
JOHN IRVING -
…I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.
JOHN IRVING -
A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
JOHN IRVING -
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
JOHN IRVING -
Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
JOHN IRVING -
The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
JOHN IRVING -
The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
JOHN IRVING -
You’re nice,’ Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. ‘And you’re my oldest friend.’ But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
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






