697 Quotes by John Irving

You're the biggest secret I know...The only way I know what's going on with you is the only way everyone else knows it. I just have to wait and read your next book.

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.

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

...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

Wallace Worthington would have reminded Wilbur Larch of someone he might have met at the Channing-Peabodys’, where Dr. Larch went to perform his second abortion – the rich people’s abortion, as Larch thought of it. Wallace Worthington would strike Homer Wells as what a real King of New England should look like.

What do you think I imagine making love to a vagina would be like? Maybe like having sex with a ballroom!

Wizened and white, with brown blotched on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.

In a living city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don't hold still.

don't worry - so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me.