Quote

If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.

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
Socialist
Told
Probably
Anything

More quotes by John Irving

Image
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
John Irving
Image
Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
John Irving
Image
I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
John Irving
Image
But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
John Irving
Image
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
John Irving
Image
I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
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
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
There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving
Image
Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
John Irving
Image
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
Image
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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
I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
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
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
I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany.
John Irving
Image
Keep passing the open windows.
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
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