Quote

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

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
Life
Tried
Accept
Normal
Accepting
Call
Common
Heart
Ache
Would
Symptoms

More quotes by John Irving

Image
So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.
John Irving
Image
…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
Image
There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
Image
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
John Irving
Image
. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
John Irving
Image
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.
John Irving
Image
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
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
You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
Image
Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
John Irving
Image
The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
John Irving
Image
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
John Irving
Image
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
Image
Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
John Irving
Image
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure. It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.
John Irving
Image
I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
Image
It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
Image
The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
John Irving
Image
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
John Irving
Image
My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
John Irving