John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt Jr. on March 2, 1942) is an American novelist and screenwriter.
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
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.
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
I have no respect for the right-to-life position. But when you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion. The Catholic Church may espouse its opinion on abortion to the members of its congregation. But they are in violation of separation of church and state when they try to proselytize their abortion politics on people who are not Catholics.
Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
Being wrong about important things is exhausting.
Our memory is a monster; you forget it - it does not.
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. "
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.
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.