John Irving Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

  John Irving

  Writing, Giving, Cooking

  John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

• Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.

  John Irving

  Crazy, People, Giving

  John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

• Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.

  John Irving

  Christmas, Home, Loss

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

  John Irving

  Giving, Asking, Please

• 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.

  John Irving

  Hate, Giving, Lessons

  John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.229, Random House

• Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!

  John Irving

  Thinking Of You, Children, Crazy

• So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

  John Irving

  Mother, Dream, Brother

  John Irving (1986). “The Hotel New Hampshire”

• You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.

  John Irving

  Tattoo, Men, Giving

• It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support; they want someone to say, "Good job."

  John Irving

  Jobs, Writing, Giving

• You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

  John Irving

  Character, People, Giving

  Interview with Suzanne Herel, www.motherjones.com. May/June 1997.

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