697 Quotes by John Irving

I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability—there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material—but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?

I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, "I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure." It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.

I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

I get up early. I like to read a little before anyone but the dog is up. I also like to read at night, not in bed but just before I go to bed.

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.