697 Quotes by John Irving

Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo.

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

My dear boy, " Miss Frost said sharply. "My dear boy, please don't put a label on me - don't make a category before you get to know me!

Moreover, there was what Amy called “the cocksuckers’ contingent of the country”—what Danny knew as the dumber-than-dog-shit element, those bully patriots—and they were too set in their ways or too poorly educated (or both) to see beyond the ceaseless flag-waving and nationalistic bluster.

No matter what my fucking last words were, please say they were these: 'I have always known that the pursuit of excellence is a lethal habit.

What would Miss Frost have thought of me? I wondered; I didn't mean my writing. What would she have thought of my relationships with men and women? Had I ever "protected" anyone? For whom had I truly been worthwhile?

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.