697 Quotes by John Irving

I suppose I try to look for those things where the world turns on you. It's every automobile accident, every accident at a party, you're having a good time until suddenly you're not.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.

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

Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.