John Irving Quotes: 13

• If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

• If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

• You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

  The Hotel New Hampshire

• My life is a reading list.

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

• It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

  The Hotel New Hampshire

• In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me

  The World According to Garp

• It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans.

  The Cider House Rules

• It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

• O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

• Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.

  Last Night in Twisted River

• You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

  A Widow for One Year

• 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)

• Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement,'"said the sorrowful girl. "'What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives.

  A Prayer for Owen Meany