697 Quotes by John Irving


  • Author John Irving
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    Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.

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  • Author John Irving
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    When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

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  • Author John Irving
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    The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.

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  • Author John Irving
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    So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

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  • Author John Irving
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    I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.

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  • Author John Irving
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    One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

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  • Author John Irving
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    And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

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