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
Thing
Life
Everybody
Dies

More quotes by John Irving

Image
It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
John Irving
Image
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
John Irving
Image
If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
John Irving
Image
I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
John Irving
Image
For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
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
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
Image
Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
John Irving
Image
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
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
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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
A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
John Irving
Image
You think you have a memory but it has you!
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
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
John Irving
Image
And never forget, there is memory.
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