John Irving Quotes

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy

If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can't shut it off.

You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.

In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me

If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

My life is a reading list.

It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.

Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.

Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

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.

O God - please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement,'" said the sorrowful girl. "'What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives.

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either."

(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

Life is serious but art is fun!

Half my life is an act of revision.