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
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
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
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
Half my life is an act of revision. - 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
Life is serious but art is fun! - John Irving