Quote

I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.

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
Children
Baptizing
Believe
Motions
Churches
Married
Getting
Church
Stills
Still

More quotes by John Irving

Image
I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
John Irving
Image
Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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
Imagining something is better than remembering something.
John Irving
Image
There's nothing as scary as the future.
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
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
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
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
I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
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
You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
Image
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving
Image
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
Image
I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
John Irving
Image
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
John Irving
Image
Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
Image
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
Image
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
John Irving
Image
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
John Irving