John Irving

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

I wasn't afraid of anything until I had a kid. Then I was terrified because immediately I could imagine a hundred ways in which I could not protect him.

Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you.

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.

All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.

And Father said, “There are no happy endings.” “Right!” cried Iowa Bob – an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. “Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature,” Coach Bob declared. “So what?” my father said. “Right!” cried Iowa Bob. “That’s the point: So what?” Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.

Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.

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

Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean - make sure they know what they mean!

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

It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.

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

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

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.