John Irving

He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you."

— John Irving

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

— John Irving

Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory.

— John Irving

In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

— John Irving

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

— John Irving

You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

— John Irving

Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.

— John Irving

Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

— John Irving

Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean—make sure they know what they mean!

— John Irving

The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!

— John Irving

But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see.

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

— John Irving

I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.'

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student—and not a good one—and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved.

— John Irving

This is Marxism. It's leveling everything by decimating what works ... It's that vindictive 'We've suffered, and now we're going to take money from your kid and watch you squirm'... There's a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that's rich people.

— John Irving

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.

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

— John Irving

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)

— John Irving

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

— John Irving

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

— John Irving