According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any fiction, by with she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I preferred this kind of fantasizing or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.

— John Irving

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

— John Irving

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.

— John Irving

And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace--and with what confidence?

— John Irving

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed, a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.

— John Irving

A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?

— John Irving

As for Jenny, she felt only that women - just like men - should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.

— John Irving

As Gap put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions.

— John Irving

A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter -- it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood -- they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having ‘higher purposes.’ A terrorist is a pornographer.

— John Irving

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy

— John Irving