It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
More John Irving Quotes
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING -
You don’t want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
JOHN IRVING -
We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it – and reward it in all manner of ways.
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 -
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 -
There’s nothing as scary as the future.
JOHN IRVING -
In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
JOHN IRVING -
A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
JOHN IRVING -
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
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 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.
JOHN IRVING -
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
JOHN IRVING -
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
JOHN IRVING -
Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
JOHN IRVING -
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