Quote

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

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
Boys
Make
Category
Label
Categories
Labels
Dear
Please

More quotes by John Irving

Image
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
John Irving
Image
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
Image
The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
John Irving
Image
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
John Irving
Image
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
John Irving
Image
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
John Irving
Image
You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
John Irving
Image
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
John Irving
Image
My life is a reading list.
John Irving
Image
It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
John Irving
Image
… 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
Image
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
John Irving
Image
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
John Irving
Image
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
John Irving
Image
Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
Image
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
Image
Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
John Irving
Image
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
John Irving