"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."

Enemy, Enemies, Reason, Want

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"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."

Exlpore more Enemy quotes

"'Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems."

William Shakespeare, English Dramatist

Enemy,

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

George Orwell, British Author

Enemy, Insincerity, Language, Words

"When I'm left on my own I'm my own worst enemy."

Ron Wood, British Musician

Enemy,

"It's hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It's hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you've had him for long enough."

Joe Abercrombie, English Novelist

Enemy, Friendship, Emotion, Conflict

"Let the poor man count as his enemy, and his worst enemy, every invader of the right of free discussion."

Gerrit Smith, American Politician

Enemy, Man, Poor, Right

"One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good."

Edmund Burke, Irish Statesman

Enemy, Evil

"Comforts and syphilis are the greatest enemies of mankind."

Alexis Carrel, French Scientist

Enemy, Enemies, Mankind

"The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they're dead is the nasty things I've said about them."

Camille Paglia, American Author

Enemy, Enemies, Will

"Everyone needs a warm personal enemy or two to keep him free from rust in the movable parts of his mind."

Gene Fowler, American Journalist

Enemy, Mind, Needs

"I can do nothing with the enemy save observe him."

John Buford, American Soldier

Enemy, Nothing

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."

Business, Actor, Pretty, Skin

"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."

Family, Sense

"There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep."

World,

"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."

Writing, Months

"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."

Reading, Read

"Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo."

Literature, Story, Novel, Reality, Imagination

"In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they're foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity."

Society, Pity, Observation, Humanity, Truth

"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?"

Worship, Faith, Individual, Ritual, Critique

"Self-hatred is worse than loneliness."

Psychology, Self, Truth, Hate, Emotion

"I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with."

Sympathy, People, Fact, Laughter