This gets complicated, because I know that not all ghosts are dead. In certain cases, you can be a ghost and still be half-alive – only a significant part of you has died. I wonder how many of these half-alive ghosts are aware of what has died in them, and – dead or alive – if there are rules for ghosts.

— John Irving

John Irving Quotes

A what?” said Egg. No doubt he thought that an inferiority complex was a weapon; sometimes, I guess, it is.

— John Irving

Okay,” I said. There are these moments when you see the course of your life unfolding, and you feel powerless to alter it.

— John Irving

Greene’s writing – he was the first modern writer I liked. Before Greene, my heroes were all novelists from the nineteenth century. Living in the nineteenth century can expand your loneliness; as a writer, it’s lonely living there.

— John Irving

They resembled an elderly, long-married couple – devoted to each other without conversation.

— John Irving

But you don’t see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you’ve missed.

— John Irving

Elliot told me that bigots could be “slippery” if you accused them outright.

— John Irving

The past is everlasting.

— John Irving

It sounds the same to me, Kid,” Molly said. “The new lift takes you to the same old place. It’s the same trip, just a faster ride – it’s no more or less depressing than it ever was,” she added.

— John Irving

As Nora had also said, “Nothing will change.” She meant the Catholic Church and the Republicans, but – according to Em – the Republicans would get worse.

— John Irving

Reading good novels can make young readers seem more experienced about relationships than they are.

— John Irving

When you write about your life as a screenplay, it’s as if you’re watching someone else’s life; it’s not your life, and you’re not living it. You’re only seeing what the characters do, your character included. And screenplays are written in the present tense – as if nothing has already happened, as if everything is unfolding in the present. I’m only saying this is how it started – how I began to see my life as an unmade movie. The way it began was almost natural. INT.

— John Irving

Reading good novels can make almost anything seem imaginable.

— John Irving

Murder, more murders, still more murders! The Germans take murder more seriously than we do – I mean, as literature,” Uncle Johan explained.

— John Irving

What my grandmother meant was that supper was ready to eat. Only the cooking of it was finished. As usual, it was an overcooked casserole of unidentifiable ingredients; it was mortally finished, a casserole cooked into submission. Also finished was what remained of my aunts’ patience with my uncles’ lack of clarity concerning their wartime memories.

— John Irving

My mother named me Adam, like you-know-who.

— John Irving

Of course, I was not yet born when my mother told her parents she was pregnant.

— John Irving

There’s a reason we’re fiction writers, you know – real life sucks; make-believe is our business,” I try to tell her.

— John Irving

This gets complicated, because I know that not all ghosts are dead. In certain cases, you can be a ghost and still be half-alive – only a significant part of you has died. I wonder how many of these half-alive ghosts are aware of what has died in them, and – dead or alive – if there are rules for ghosts.

— John Irving

Adam, we can’t make being safe the guiding principle of our lives. We have to be who we are – we can only do what we do, sweetie.

— John Irving

Even before she started talking to Franny, I could see how desperately important this woman’s private unhappiness was to her, and how – in her mind – the only credible reaction to the event of rape was hers. That someone else might have responded differently to a similar abuse only meant to her that the abuse couldn’t possibly have been the same.

— John Irving
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