I’ve always been slow but I’m even slower now. I’m more into the waiting, or I guess I’m more patient about the waiting.
JOHN IRVINGIn the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
More John Irving Quotes
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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
JOHN IRVING -
So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.
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 -
The gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
JOHN IRVING -
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
JOHN IRVING -
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
JOHN IRVING -
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
JOHN IRVING -
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
JOHN IRVING -
Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
JOHN IRVING -
All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.
JOHN IRVING -
Keep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVING -
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
JOHN IRVING -
No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
JOHN IRVING -
It’s not right to hurt or deceive someone who’s already been hurt and deceived.
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






