John Irving
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.Collection: Love
The book works better if I know everything I can about the ending. Not just what happens, but how it happens and what the language is; not just the last sentence, but enough of the sentences surrounding that last sentence to know what the tone of voice is. I imagined it as something almost musical. Then you are writing toward something; you know the sound of your voice at the end of the story. That's how you want to sound in those final sentences: the degree that it is uplifting or not, the degree that it is melancholic or not.Collection: Uplifting
I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.Collection: Rhinos
As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.Collection: Temper
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.Collection: Children
It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.Collection: Trying
In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?Collection: Book
Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.Collection: Disappointment
No one could have fathomed what a life he'd led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.Collection: Mind
I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.Collection: Boys
She felt detached from her family, and thought it strange how they had lavished so much attention on her, as a child, and then at some appointed, prearranged time they seemed to stop the flow of affection and being the expectations - as if, for a brief phrase, you were expected to absorb love (and get enough), and then, for a much longer and more serious phase, you were expected to fulfill certain obligations.Collection: Children
I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.Collection: Night
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.Collection: Wall
Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.Collection: Real
You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and self-abuse and self-aggrandizement and self-deception and pompousness and self-righteousness and cruelty and indifference beyond what any other species has demonstrated the capacity for, which is the capacity for all the above.Collection: Writing
My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!Collection: Boys
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.Collection: Self
The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?Collection: Writing
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.Collection: Character
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.Collection: Loneliness
Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be mayCollection: Believe
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met youCollection: Running
A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.Collection: Life
Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.Collection: Adults
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.Collection: Choices
Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, eitherCollection: Choices
Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.Collection: Real
The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.Collection: Powerful
So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.Collection: Real
It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support; they want someone to say, "Good job."Collection: Jobs
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.Collection: Writing
No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.Collection: Baby
Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.Collection: Ice Cream
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.Collection: War
But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.Collection: Thinking
They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.Collection: Thinking
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.Collection: Opportunity
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.Collection: Should Have
YOU LET ME DROWN!” Owen said. “YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he told us. “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE.Collection: Remember
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.Collection: White
THERE'S NO MONKEY BUSINESS ABOUT THIS ELECTION,' he told the voters. 'IF YOU'RE ENOUGH OF AN ASSHOLE TO VOTE FOR NIXON, YOUR DUMB VOTE WILL BE COUNTED––JUST LIKE ANYBODY ELSE!Collection: Dumb
In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.Collection: Loss
It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.Collection: Men
Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.Collection: Christmas
Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.Collection: Crazy
I've always been interested in miracles, or the miraculous of the unexplained. I don't scoff at what makes people believe or want to believe. I think I understand the tremendous attraction of the mysteries of the church to the same degree that I understand and appreciate the frustration people feel, especially believers, with the human rule-making arm of the church, with the not-miraculous part of the church - any church.Collection: Believe
You think you have a memory; but it has you!Collection: Memories
Life is an X-rated soap opera.Collection: Opera
Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.Collection: Hurt