697 Quotes by John Irving

Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We’re screwed down here-for life!

There’s nothing as scary as the future.

They were members of Maine’s very small money class. Their business, as they ridiculously called it, didn’t make a cent, but they didn’t need to make money; they were born rich. Their needless enterprise consisted of taking people to the wilderness and creating for them the sensation that they were lost there; they also took people shooting down rapids in frail rafts or canoes, creating for them the sensation that they would surely be bashed to death before they drowned.

Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.

I don’t begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.

The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again. The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you – just watching you, waiting for you to wake up.

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.

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer – not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, ‘You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.’ Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

I realize that a writer’s business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.