top of page
.png){kind=small}
Exlpore more Being quotes
"To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present."
"Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth."
"Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing."
"Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal."
"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection."
Explore more quotes by John Irving
"I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin."
"You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one."
"More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina."
"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."
"I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story."
"Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is."
"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."
"This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on."
"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."
bottom of page