John Irving Zitate

seite 3

„Das Leben ist leider nicht so gebaut wie ein guter, altmodischer Roman. Vielmehr endet es, wenn sich diejenigen, die sich erschöpfen sollen, erschöpft haben. Alles, was bleibt, ist die Erinnerung.“

„Aber das ist es nun mal, was wir tun: wir träumen weiter gegen den Strom und unsere Träume entschlüpfen uns fast so lebendig, wie wir sie heraufbeschwören können.“

„Fucking men.“

„Vielleicht muss es im Leben eines Schriftstellers diesen Augenblick geben, in dem ein anderer Schriftsteller beschuldigt wird, seinen Beruf verfehlt zu haben.“

„Dieser Hund war ein Killer, und das einzige, was ihn schützte, war eines der vielen durchsichtigen und widersinnigen Vorurteile, für die die amerikanische Oberschicht berühmt ist: nämlich dass die Kinder und Haustiere der Aristokratie gar nicht frei genug sein können und dass sie gar nicht imstande sind, jemandem weh zu tun. Dass es anderen Leuten verboten sein müsste, die Welt zu übervölkern oder ihre Hunde von der Leine zu lassen, dass aber die Hunde und Kinder der reichen Leute ein Recht darauf haben, frei herumzulaufen.“

„Irgend jemand sollte Mrs. Reagan sagen, dass keineswegs die jungen Leute - nicht einmal die Drogenkonsumenten unter ihnen - für die gewichtigsten Probleme, vor denen die Welt steht, verantwortlich sind!“

“If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough.”

“If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.”

“Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water… remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.”

“A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.”

“Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.”

“The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.”

“Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.”

“And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”

“Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.”

“This is a writer’s lesson:
To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.”

“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.”

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

“Being wrong about important things is exhausting.”

“…there is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old…”

“As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.”

“It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.”

“…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.”

“I think about you more and more, but I don't waste my time - or yours - thinking about who you were before I knew you.”

“Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.”

“(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action”

“Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.”

“If pride is a sin… moral pride is the greatest sin.”

“You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.”

“Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.”

“Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.”

“A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.”

“[On his process for writing novels:] I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.”

“The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!”

“He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you."”