No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
JOHN IRVINGLife,” 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.
More John Irving Quotes
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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 -
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it – rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
JOHN IRVING -
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 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 -
You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVING -
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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 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 -
…every study of the gods, of everyone’s gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
JOHN IRVING -
There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
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 -
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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 -
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
JOHN IRVING