697 Quotes by John Irving

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.

There was no solution,” Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “but the universal solution that life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day – that is forget oneself.

Sure, I know them. You can’t exactly get lost in Winnipeg.

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

Many of Juan Diego’s demons had been his childhood companions-he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.

Lupe’s language is just a little different,” Juan Diego was saying. “I can understand it.

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything – maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

What did you do that for?” the customs guy asked him. “We haven’t been getting along lately,” Jack admitted. “Well, this’ll really help,” the guy said.

Things often are as they appear. First impressions matter.