John Irving Quotes

Remember," Duncan asked on the plane, "how Walt asked if it was green or brown?"
Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.

The object of war is to survive it.

But the available light in Twisted River was dim and growing dimmer. The dance-hall door blew (or was slammed) closed, cutting off Teresa Brewer as suddenly as if Six-Pack had taken the singer's slender throat in her hands. When the dance-hall door blew (or was kicked) open again, Tony Bennett was crooning "Rags to Riches." Dominic didn't for a moment doubt that the town's eternal violence was partly spawned by irredeemable music.

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone's older brother and someone's older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.

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

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.

He felt the pregnant woman squeeze his hand so hard that it hurt. The word 'Mother!' was strangely on his lips when Nurse Angela finally got the door open and seized Homer Wells in her arms.
'Oh, oh!' she cried. 'Oh Homer – my Homer, our Homer! I knew you'd be back!'
And because the pregnant woman's hand still firmly held Homer's hand – neither one of them felt able to let go – Nurse Angela turned and included the woman in her embrace. It seemed to Nurse Angela that this pregnant woman was just another orphan who belonged (like Homer Wells) exactly where she was.

But comedy is ingrained. A writer doesn't choose to be comic. You can choose a plot, or not to have one. You can choose your characters. But comedy is not a choice; it just comes out that way.

Lupe's language is just a little different," Juan Diego was saying. "I can understand it.

The memoir-novel dumbed down fiction and traduced

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN'T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT!" [Owen Meany] said crossly. "LOOK AT THOSE WEIRDO TV MIRACLE-WORKERS
THEY'RE TRYING TO GET PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN MAGIC! BUT THE REAL MIRACLES AREN'T ANYTHING YOU CAN SEE
THEY'RE THINGS YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE WITHOUT SEEING. IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST!

According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.

Whoever acquired any real or substantive intelligence from reading newspapers? I'm sure I have no in-depth comprehension of American villany; yet I can't leave the news alone! You'd think I might profit from my experience with ice cream. If I have ice cream in my freezer, I'll eat it--I'll eat all of it, all at once. Therefore, I've learned not to buy ice cream. Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate headlines, are pure fat.

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.

I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn't travel very far."
"What stuff is that?" he'd asked her.
"We're completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads", she'd told him. Maybe that's part of what being a writer entails, Danny Baciagalupo found himself thinking on that rainy spring night in Iowa city.

IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST! (page 286)

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.

Churchill Park have their bellies turned toward the sun.

When Homer Wells saw the stationmaster's brain stem exposed, he felt that Dr. Larch was busy enough – with both hands – for it to be safe to say what Homer wanted to say.
'I love you,' said Homer Wells. He knew he had to leave the room, then – while he could still see the door – and so he started to leave.
'I love you too, Homer,' said Wilbur Larch, who for another minute or more could not have seen a blood clot in the brain stem if there had been one to see. He heard Homer say 'Right' before he heard the door close.
In a while, he could make out the brain stem clearly, there was no clot.
'Arrhythmia,' Wilbur Larch repeated to himself. Then he added, 'Right,' as if he were now speaking for Homer Wells. Dr. Larch put his instruments aside; he gripped the operating table for a long time.

It was quality that killed Lilly; it was the end of The Great Gatsby, which was not her ending, which was not an ending within her grasp.

There's nothing so confusing as finding out that you don't know someone you thought you knew.

THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN GET AMERICANS TO NOTICE ANYTHING IS TO TAX THEM OR DRAFT THEM OR KILL THEM, Owen said.

Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy.

Lupe was upset that the Japanese honeymooners were wearing surgical masks over their mouths and noses; she imagined the young Japanese couples were dying of some dread disease - she thought they'd come to Of the Roses to beg Our Lady of Guadalupe to save them. "But aren't they contagious?" Lupe asked. "How many people have they infected between here and Japan?" How much of Juan Diego's translation and Edward Bonshaw's explanation to Lupe was lost in the crowd noise? The proclivity of the Japanese to be "precautionary," to wear surgical masks to protect themselves from bad air or disease - well, it was unclear if Lupe ever understood what that was about.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

Return trips, to this day ... are simply invitations to dull trances or leaden slumber,

Mr. Wiggin injected a kind of horror-movie element into the Christmas miracle; to the rector, every Bible story was-if properly understood-threatening.

I don't want you to describe to me - not ever - what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything
maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

... there is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old ...

Listen to me, Bill," Richard said. "Let the librarian be your new best friend. If you like what she's given you to read, trust her. The library, the theater, a passion for novels and plays - well, Bill, this could be the door to your future. At your age, I lived in a library! Now novels and plays are my life.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam - to the greater glory of God.

Don't ever die, Juan Diego had written to Brother Pepe from Iowa City. What Juan Diego meant was that HE would die if he lost Pepe.

I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Thinking of Rooie, he was not entirely alone. He'd even chosen a hotel that he thought Rooie would have liked. Although it was not the most expensive hotel in Zurich, it was too expensive for a cop. But Harry had traveled so little that he'd saved a fair amount of money. He didn't expect the 2nd District to pay for his room at the Hotel Zum Storchen, not even for one night, yet that was where he wanted to stay. It was a charmingly romantic hotel on the banks of the Limmat, and Harry chose a room that looked across the river at the floodlit Rathaus.

Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.

And Father said, "There are no happy endings." "Right!" cried Iowa Bob – an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. "Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature," Coach Bob declared. "So what?" my father said. "Right!" cried Iowa Bob. "That's the point: So what?" Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings.

I later found a bookstore on the Calle de Gravina - Libros, I believe it was called. (I'm not kidding, a bookstore called "Books.")

Life is an X-rated soap opera.

Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

This prevented Elaine from making up any stories about whomever I was seeing at the time, man or woman. Therefore, no one was falsely accused of shitting in the bed.

I had acquired an undeniable mystique - if only to the Bancroft butt-room boys. Don't forget: Miss Frost was an older woman, and that goes a long way with boys - even if the older woman has a penis!

The chain of events, the links in our lives - what leads us where we're going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don't see coming, and what we do - all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.

What bothered Ruth was that she needed to be with Rooie again -- just to see, as in a story, what would happen next. That meant Rooie was in charge.

As for the river, it just kept moving,as river do
as rivers do. Under the logs, the body of the young Canadian moved with the river, which jostled him to and fro
to and fro. If, at this moment in time Twisted River also appeared restless, even impatient, maybe the river itself wanted the boy's body to move on, too, move on, too.

I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald's sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her - as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.

The history of a city was like the history of a family - there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

That was the night he got up and went to the boys' division; perhaps he was looking for his history in the big room where all the boys slept, but what he found instead was Dr. Larch kissing every boy a late good night. Homer imagined then that Dr. Larch had kissed him like that, when he'd been small; Homer could not have imagined how those kisses, even now, were still kisses meant for him. They were kisses seeking Homer Wells.
That was the same night that he saw the lynx on the barren, unplanted hillside - glazed with snow that had thawed and then refrozen into a thick crust. Homer had stepped outside for just a minute; after witnessing the kisses, he desired the bracing air. It was a Canada lynx - a dark, gunmetal gray against the lighter gray of the moonlit snow, its wildcat stench so strong Homer gagged to srnell the thing. Its wildcat sense was keen enough to keep it treading within a single leap's distance of the safety of the woods. The lynx was crossing the brow of the hill when it began to slide; its claws couldn't grip the crust of the snow, and the hill had suddenly grown steeper. The cat moved from the dull moonlight into the sharper light from Nurse Angela's office window; it could not help its sideways descent. It traveled closer to the orphanage than it would ever have chosen to come, its ferocious death smell clashing with the freezing cold. The lynx's helplessness on the ice had rendered its expression both terrified; and resigned; both madness and fatali

A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?

If (a writer) has applied himself to an art for 15 or 20 years and they've gotten good at it, and they're expected to do something else to support themselves while the industry that sells this craft supports itself very well, something is badly wrong. Morally wrong.

I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.

A man you like, you mean, Tabitha?" my grandmother asked. "I wouldn't mention him if I didn't like him," my mother said. "I want you to meet him," she said to us all. "You've dated him?" my grandmother asked. "No! I just met him - just today, on today's train!" my mother said. "And already you like him?" Lydia asked, in a tone of voice so perfectly copied from my grandmother that I had to look to see which one of them was speaking. "Well, yes," my mother said seriously. "You know such things. You don't need that much time.

No touching Baby Jesus."
"But we're his parents!" proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation.
"Mary Beth," Barb Wiggin said, "if you touch the Baby Jesus, I'm putting you in a cow costume.

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And you wouldn't want to bring her home - at least not to entertain your guests or amuse the children. No, Juan Diego thought - you would want to keep her, all for yourself.

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic," Richard told me. "And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious.

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

Nostalgia!" Miss Frost cried. "You´re nostalgic!" She repeated. "Just how old are you, William?" She asked.

"Seventeen, " I told her.

"Seventeen!" Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. "Well, William Abbott, if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!

That's what I love about boys," Marion told him. "No matter what, you just go about your business.

I must part with you for my whole life," she read, with horror. "I must begin a new existence amongst strange faces and strange scenes." The truth of that closed the book for her, forever.

Dr. Gingrich and Mrs. Goodhall had prevailed upon the board of trustees; the board had requested that Larch comply with Dr. Gingrich's recommendation of a 'follow-up report' on the status of each orphan's success (or failure) in each foster home. If this added paperwork was too tedious for Dr. Larch, the board recommended that Larch take Mrs. Goodhall's suggestion and accept an administrative assistant. Don't I have enough history to attend to, as is? Larch wondered. He rested in the dispensary; he sniffed a little ether and composed himself. Gingrich and Goodhall, he said to himself. Ginghall and Goodrich, he muttered. Richhall and Ginggood! Goodring and Hallrich! He woke himself, giggling.
'What are you so merry about?' Nurse Angela said sharply to him from the hall outside the dispensary.
'Goodballs and Ding Dong!' Wilbur Larch said to her.

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio could make Pepe feel as if he were a betrayer of the Catholic faith - as if he were a raving secular humanist, or worse. (Could there be anyone worse, from a Jesuitical perspective?) Father Alfonso and Father Octavio knew their Catholic dogma by rote; while the two priests talked circles around Brother Pepe, and they made Pepe feel inadequate in his belief, they were irreparably doctrinaire.

The principal difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape (the narrower the margin, the greater the adventure).

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.

Nurse Angela, with her love of cats and orphans, once remarked of Homer Wells that the boy must adore the name she gave him because he fought so hard not to lose it.

Buster was queer as a cat fart.

Here in St. Cloud's," Dr. Larch wrote, " I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won't be may

Yet no litany of sexually transmitted diseases was likely to scare Edward Bonshaw away; sexual attraction isn't strictly scientific.

You think you have a memory; but it has you! Later,

It was not out of love that I wanted to meet my father, but out of the darkest curiosity - to be able to recognize, in myself, what evil I might be capable of.

Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things.

You don't sound very well Owen." I pointed out to him. "IF JESUS HAD TO BE BORN ON A DAY LIKE THIS. I DON'T THINK HE'D HAVE LASTED LONG ENOUGH TO BE CRUCIFIED." Owen said.

I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them ... they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

Jack realized that when you're happy – especially when it's the first time in your life – you think of things that would never have occurred to you when you were unhappy.

Just give me the antibiotic," Esperanza said. "Of course I'll be infected again! I'm a prostitute.

But I had to keep my hands under the desk - my fists under the desk, I should say. The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law - they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood! I know that some of the girls have told their parents that I deliver "ranting lectures" to them about the United States; some

I met him in the language lab. In a lull between lab sections, I was editing tapes for freshman German when this shuffling man of hair came in. Possibly twenty, or forty; possibly student, or faculty, Trotskyite or Amish farmer, human or animal; a theif lumbering out of a camera shop, laden with lenses and light meters; a bear who after a terrible and violent struggle ate a photographer. This beast approached me.

You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. 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."
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

The situation Larch was thinking of was war, the so-called war in Europe; Larch, and many others, feared that the war wouldn't stay there. ('I'm sorry, Homer,' Larch imagined having to tell the boy. 'I don't want you to worry, but you have a bad heart; it just wouldn't stand up to a war.') What Larch meant was that his own heart would never stand up to Homer Wells's going to war.
The love of Wilbur Larch for Homer Wells extended even to his tampering with history, a field wherein he was an admitted amateur, but it was nonetheless a field that he respected and also loved. (In an earlier entry in the file on Homer Wells – an entry that Dr. Larch removed, for it lent an incorrect tone of voice, or at least a tone of voice unusual for history – Dr. Larch had written: 'I love nothing or no one as much as I love Homer Wells. Period.

Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you.

Casey recalled how Gail defended herself in the parking lot of the English & Philosophy Building from the unwanted attentions of a lecherous fellow student, who shall remain nameless. 'Please leave me alone,' Ms Godwin warned the offending student, 'or I shall be forced to wound you with a weapon you can ill afford to be wounded by in a town this small.' The threat was most mysterious, not to mention writerly, but the oafish lecher was not easily deterred. 'And what might that weapon be, little lady?' the lout allegedly asked. 'Gossip,' Gail Godwin replied.

I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become.

May God watch over your soul, which no man may abuse.

In Wally's bedroom Homer marveled at how the world was simultaneously being invented and destroyed.
Nothing marvelous about that, Dr. Larch would have assured him. At St. Cloud's, except for the irritation about sugar stamps and other aspects of the rationing, very little was changed by the war. (Or by what people once singled out as the Depression, thought Wilbur Larch.)
We are an orphanage; we provide these services; we stay the same – if we're allowed to stay the same, he thought. When he would almost despair, when the ether was too overpowering, when his own age seemed like the last obstacle and the vulnerability of his illegal enterprise was as apparent to him as the silhouettes of the fir trees against the sharp night skies of autumn, Wilbur Larch would save himself with this one thought: I love Homer Wells, and I have saved him from the war.

I TRUST THAT GOD WILL HELP ME, BECAUSE WHAT I'M SUPPOSED TO DO LOOKS VERY HARD.

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show," he recited from memory.

And when Dr. Daruwalla breathed in her dangerous aroma, he thought he'd at last identified the smell of sex, which struck him as an earthy commingling of death and flowers