697 Quotes by John Irving

Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.

Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.

I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.

It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.

I wasn't afraid of anything until I had a kid. Then I was terrified because immediately I could imagine a hundred ways in which I could not protect him.

Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.

Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.