John Irving Quotes - Page 2

This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.

Well, you finally got me," Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.

People regard art too highly, and history not enough

The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.

It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.

Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.

I you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people - because, surely, Wally was nice - would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer - and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."

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

Vielleicht muss es im Leben eines Schriftstellers diesen Augenblick geben, in dem ein anderer Schriftsteller beschuldigt wird, seinen Beruf verfehlt zu haben.