Quote

Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

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
Everybody
Dies
Thing
Life

More quotes by John Irving

Image
And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
John Irving
Image
You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
Image
I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
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
The object of war is to survive it.
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
Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
John Irving
Image
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
Image
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
John Irving
Image
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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
Image
A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
John Irving
Image
I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
John Irving
Image
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
John Irving
Image
I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving
Image
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
John Irving
Image
Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
John Irving
Image
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
John Irving