John Irving

“If you're God's instrument, Owen," I said, "how come you need my help to stuff a basketball?”

“The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.”

“In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.”

“Lemties neįmanoma įžvelgti, nebent jei sapnuoji ar esi apsvaigęs iš meilės.”

“Isn't it amazing? The Americans have so many good afterthoughts!”

“You'd better leave your chromosomes at the door.”

“You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”

“but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.”

“She was convinced that women were as often victims of themselves as they were of men.”

“But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.”

“Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news—the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual equivalent of a cheeseburger with everything on it; but for the duration of my interest in it, all my other interests are consumed by it, and whatever appetites and capacities I may have had for detachment and reflection are suddenly subordinate to this cheeseburger in my life! I offer this as self-criticism; but what it means to be "political" is that you welcome these obsessions with cheeseburgers—at great cost to the rest of your life.”

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

“MADE FOR TELEVISION.”

“woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.”

“Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.”

“De alguna manera -había argumentado Garp- la vida es demasiado. La vida es un folletín melodramático no apto para menores, John”

“Hago lo que quiero - afirmó Garp -. No le pongas otro nombre. Sólo hago lo que me da la gana... y eso es precisamente lo que hizo mi madre toda su vida, o sea lo que quería hacer.”

“I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.”

“...I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.”

“Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.”

“...return trips, to this day...are simply invitations to dull trances or leaden slumber,”

“We don't enjoy giving directions in New Hampshire-we tend to think if you don't know where you're going, you don't belong where you are.”

“And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”

“She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance.”

“An affection that was calculated was never trustworthy.”

“That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.”

“If you don't feel you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then what you're doing probably isn't very vital. If you don't feel that you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it? If you don't have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you're not trying to tell enough.”

“I TRUST THAT GOD WILL HELP ME, BECAUSE WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO DO LOOKS VERY HARD.”

“Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.”

“Ah, well..." I started to say, and then stopped. So that was where he was going; I'd heard it before. Richard had told me that I'd not been standing in my mother's shoes in 1942, when I was born; he'd said I couldn't, or shouldn't, judge her. It was my not forgiving her that irked him-it was my intolerance of her intolerance that bugged him.”

“But the available light in Twisted River was dim and growing dimmer. The dance-hall door blew (or was slammed) closed, cutting off Teresa Brewer as suddenly as if Six-Pack had taken the singer’s slender throat in her hands. When the dance-hall door blew (or was kicked) open again, Tony Bennett was crooning “Rags to Riches.” Dominic didn’t for a moment doubt that the town’s eternal violence was partly spawned by irredeemable music.”

“I you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”

“You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.”

“...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.”

“...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.”

“Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.”

“My brain is sending poison to my heart.”

“What is this fascination the world has with death?”

“Being wrong about important things is exhausting.”

“...but you live your life at the time you live it—you don’t have much of an overview when what’s happening to you is still happening.”

“Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.”

“people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

“Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.”

“It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.”

“A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases.”

“No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.”

“There's nothing as scary as the future.”

“His resolve was blown as quickly as the rest of him.”

“Ronkers was getting out of the elevator on the first floor when the intercom paged 'Dr Heart'. There was no Dr Heart at University Hospital. 'Dr Heart' meant someone's heart had stopped.'Dr Heart?' the intercom asked sweetly. 'Please come to 304 . . .'Any doctor in the hospital was supposed to hurry to that room. There was an unwritten rule that you looked around and made a slow move to the nearest elevator, hoping another doctor would beat you to the patient. Ronkers hesitated, letting the elevator door close. He pushed the button again, but the elevator was already moving up.'Dr Heart, room 304,' the intercom said calmly. It was better than urgently crying, 'A doctor! Any doctor to room 304! Oh my God, hurry!' That might disturb the other patients and the visitors.”

“It was not the cold that made you want to rush out as soon as you'd jumped in; it was the unmeasured depth - our fear of what was on the bottom, and how far below us the bottom was.”