John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt Jr. on March 2, 1942) is an American novelist and screenwriter.
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.
wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
You live your life at the time you live it -- you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.
Before I began The Cider House Rules, I thought I wanted to write about a father-son relationship that was closer, more conflicted, and ultimately more loving, than most. Then I began to think of a relationship between an old orphanage director and an unadoptable orphan - a kid who goes out into the world and fails and keeps coming back, so that the old guy ends up with someone he's got to keep.
This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.
Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance.
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.
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.
It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.
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.
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.