John Irving Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Keep passing the open windows.”
-- John IrvingSource : FaceBook post by John Irving from Aug 06, 2014
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“If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.”
-- John Irving -
“…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.”
-- 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 IrvingSource : John Irving (2012). “The World According To Garp”, p.605, Random House
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“I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.”
-- John Irving -
“The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.”
-- 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 -
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“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 -
“All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.”
-- John Irving -
“If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.”
-- John IrvingSource : "The Mindful Writer". Book by Dinty W. Moore, 2016.
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“Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.”
-- John Irving -
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“The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.”
-- John Irving -
“Never confuse faith, or belief—of any kind—with something even remotely intellectual.”
-- John IrvingSource : John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.537, Random House
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“I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.”
-- 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 -
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“In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.”
-- John Irving -
“Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.”
-- John Irving -
“Imagining something is better than remembering something.”
-- John IrvingSource : John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket
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“Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.”
-- John Irving -
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“Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.”
-- John Irving -
“This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.”
-- John Irving -
“Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.”
-- John Irving -
“And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.”
-- John Irving -
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“All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.”
-- John Irving -
“Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.”
-- John Irving -
“Your memory is a monster; it summons with will of its own. You think you have a memory, but it has you.”
-- John Irving -
“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
-- John Irving -
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“Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.”
-- 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
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