697 Quotes by John Irving

Dear God!” the cook cried. “Soon all the wood on Twisted River will be pulpwood – for paper! What about toboggans is worse than paper?” “Books are made from paper!” Ketchum declared. “What role do toboggans play in your son’s education?

It had been an evening in the empty dance hall when not even that depth of stone and the constant stirring of the ceiling fans could cool the stifling and humid night air, which had entered the Duckworth Club as heavily as a fog from the Arabian Sea. Even atheists, like Lowji, were praying for the monsoon rains. After.

I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you’re going to be in this business, if you’re going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.

A novel is a piece of architecture. It’s not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It’s a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers.

Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.

A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

I’m a worst-case scenario person. I’m only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.

And so this added consideration – that she never get pregnant – contributed to the moderation of their coupling, which was almost always managed under conditions harsh enough to win the approval of New England’s founding fathers.