Quote

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

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
Think
Often
Thinking
Makes
Nature
Hymns
Part
Funeral
Everything
Repeat
Feel
Repeats
Feels
Acceptable
Make
Service

More quotes by 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
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
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
Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
Image
Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
Image
The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
John Irving
Image
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
Image
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
Image
Half my life is an act of revision.
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
I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
John Irving
Image
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
Image
Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
John Irving
Image
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
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
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
John Irving
Image
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
Image
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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
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