Quote

I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.

John Irving

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Findings
Finding
Language
Matter
Going

More quotes by John Irving

Image
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
John Irving
Image
The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
John Irving
Image
I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
John Irving
Image
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
John Irving
Image
Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
John Irving
Image
If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
John Irving
Image
… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
John Irving
Image
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
Image
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
John Irving
Image
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
John Irving
Image
I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
John Irving
Image
Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
Image
Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
John Irving
Image
Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
John Irving
Image
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
John Irving
Image
. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
John Irving
Image
You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
John Irving
Image
Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
Image
The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
John Irving
Image
In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
John Irving