Fleischli Irving Quotes

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. ~ John Irving

According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication. ~ Irving Babbitt

Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose. ~ John Irving

What she might have told him was that taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject; the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet. ~ John Irving

Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection. Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. ~ Washington Irving

The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them. ~ John Irving

It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour. ~ John Irving

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! ~ John Irving

We are giving the world back to man, and man back to himself. Man shall no longer be vile, but noble. We shall not destroy his mind in return for an immortal soul. Without a free, vigorous and creative mind, man is but an animal, and he will die like an animal, without any shred of a soul. We return to man his arts, his literature, his sciences, his independence to think and feel as an individual, not to be bound to dogma like a slave, to rot in his chains. ~ Irving Stone

Anything I've ever read by John Irving has been really well written. ~ Luke Bryan

The only thing I command is respect. ~ Kyrie Irving

Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions. ~ John Irving

Was the process of institutionalization both so powerful and subtle, that I could be aware of it and yet be unable to resist? ~ Irving Kenneth Zola

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

His expression I remember from the first time I met him. Open, direct. But no longer anonymous. I know certain telling details now. Like he can't stand his brother and he gets one haircut a year. He likes Raymond Chandler and John Irving, Wallce Stegner and Joan Didion. That he loves the blues and songs that tell stories. Riding the ferries just to be on water. His favorite flavor is caramel. ~ Judi Hendricks

There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times. They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavour of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more home-bred, social, and joyous than at present. ~ Washington Irving

Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to emerge from the Revolution. ~ Irving Babbitt

My goal always is to tell a universal story, meaning it's about a person who has an idea, a vision, a dream, an ambition to make the world somewhat less chaotic. ~ Irving Stone

[In the case of research director, Willis R. Whitney, whose style was to give talented investigators as much freedom as possible, you may define 'serendipity' as] the art of profiting from unexpected occurrences. When you do things in that way you get unexpected results. Then you do something else and you get unexpected results in another line, and you do that on a third line and then all of a sudden you see that one of these lines has something to do with the other. Then you make a discovery that you never could have made by going on a direct road. ~ Irving Langmuir

A woman is more considerate in affairs of love than a man; because love is more the study and business of her life. ~ Washington Irving

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

Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I'm trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader. ~ Irving Penn

Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is not cured by medication. Depression may not even be an illness at all. Often, it can be a normal reaction to abnormal situations. Poverty, unemployment, and the loss of loved ones can make people depressed, and these social and situational causes of depression cannot be changed by drugs. ~ Irving Kirsch

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. ~ John Irving

The dullest observer must be sensible of the order and serenity prevalent in those households where the occasional exercise of a beautiful form of worship in the morning gives, as it were, the keynote to every temper for the day, and attunes every spirit to harmony. ~ Washington Irving

My focus is basketball, and that's it. ~ Kyrie Irving

International law is a fiction abused callously, or ignored ruthlessly, by those nations that, unlike the Western democracies, never took it seriously in the first place. ~ Irving Kristol

[I]n the gloomy month of February ... The Deserts of Arabia are not more dreary and inhospitable than the streets of London at such a time ... ~ Washington Irving

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

The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection. ~ Irving Babbitt

And me happiest when I compose poems:
Love, power, the huzza of battle
are something, are much:
yet a poem includes them like a pool
water and reflection. ~ Irving Layton

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. ~ John Irving

The Nazis quite clearly killed millions of Jews ~ David Irving

Brought up, as Mahomet was, in the house of the guardian of the Caaba, the ceremonies and devotions connected with the sacred edifice may have given an early bias to his mind, and inclined it to those speculations in matters of religion by which it eventually became engrossed. Though his Moslem biographers would fain persuade us his high destiny was clearly foretold in his childhood by signs and prodigies, yet his education appears to have been as much neglected as that of ordinary Arab children ; for we find that he was not taught either to read or write. He was a thoughtful child, however ; quick to observe, prone to meditate on all that he observed, and possessed of an imagination fertile, daring, and expansive. The yearly influx of pilgrims from distant parts made Mecca a receptacle for all kinds of floating knowledge, which he appears to have imbibed with eagerness and retained in a tenacious memory ; and as he increased in years, a more extended sphere of observation was gradually opened to him. ~ Washington Irving

As often as I feel certain that God exists, I feel as often at a loss to say what difference it makes
that He exists
or even; that to believe in God, which I do, raises more questions than it presents answers. Thus, when I am feeling my most faithful, I also feel full of a few hard questions that I would like to put to God
I mean,critical questions of the How-Can-He, How-Could-He, How-Dare-You variety." But don't let this religious "stuff" turn you off. This is fiction, pure and simple. He just brings out some great thoughts on the way. ~ John Irving

I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences. ~ Irving Kristol