Quote

You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

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
Never
Quite
Life
Hand
Nice
Friends
Known
Squeezing
Hands
Oldest
Someone
Friend
Must
Told

More quotes by John Irving

Image
In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
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
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
Image
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
John Irving
Image
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
Image
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving
Image
Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
John Irving
Image
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
John Irving
Image
My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
John Irving
Image
And never forget, there is memory.
John Irving
Image
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
Image
You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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
If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country - USA - that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
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 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
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
John Irving
Image
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
John Irving
Image
I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
John Irving
Image
I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
John Irving