There’s nothing as scary as the future.
JOHN IRVINGI’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
More John Irving Quotes
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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 -
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change.
JOHN IRVING -
Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.
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 -
If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don’t have one. But we are a country – USA – that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
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 -
A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
JOHN IRVING -
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.
JOHN IRVING -
Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
JOHN IRVING -
The lie, of course, is more interesting.
JOHN IRVING -
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
JOHN IRVING -
There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
JOHN IRVING -
I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.
JOHN IRVING -
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
JOHN IRVING -
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING