697 Quotes by John Irving

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

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

It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy

It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans.

The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

I'll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!