John Irving Love Quotations

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

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

I want to go on being a student," I told him. "I want to be a teacher. I'm just a reader," I said. "DON'T SOUND SO ASHAMED," he said. "READING IS A GIFT." "I learned it from you," I told him. "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. 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.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.