Life is serious but art is fun! - John Irving
When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you? - John Irving
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988) - John Irving
It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination. - John Irving
Your memory is a monster; you forget -it doesn't. It simply files thingsaway. 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
Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either."(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988) - John Irving
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything. - John Irving
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. - John Irving
Half my life is an act of revision. - John Irving
I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever. - John Irving
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses. - John Irving