697 Quotes by John Irving

Treading water, a little dog-paddling – it’s a lot like writing a novel, Clark,” the dump reader told his former student. “It feels like you’re going a long way, because it’s a lot of work, but you’re basically covering old ground – you’re hanging out in familiar territory.

But not even a drunk can sleep through Boellmann’s Toccata – not even outside the church, apparently. Alice enjoyed acting out how the drunken down-and-out had presented himself.

As a fourteen-year-old, he’d not been old enough to have sympathy for her – for either the child or the adult that she was.

Listen to me, Bill,” Richard said. “Let the librarian be your new best friend. If you like what she’s given you to read, trust her. The library, the theater, a passion for novels and plays – well, Bill, this could be the door to your future. At your age, I lived in a library! Now novels and plays are my life.

Sell my old clothes – I’m off to heaven.

It’s as if you’ve been shot in the heart, Bill, but you’re unaware of the hole or the loss of blood. I doubt you even heard the shot!

In other parts of the world, they have double-bed sheets,” wrote Wilbur Larch in A Brief History of St. Cloud’s. “Here in St. Cloud’s we do without – we just do without.

The chain of events, the links in our lives – what leads us where we’re going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don’t see coming, and what we do – all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.

Logic is relative.