John Irving Quotes
Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue.
Quotes to Explore
-
Let's judge a man on what he's done.
-
I approach these people from a standpoint of love. How were they loved? How do they love? What's going on in their heart? There's that that I think about with every role.
-
Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new.
-
I've waited so long to get to this point, and I'm so happy to be making my first album. I want to be a performer and an entertainer.
-
I want audiences to see me in different avatars.
-
There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.
-
Any film is about heroism: the triumph of good over evil. If you look back at my films, you will see that as a recurring theme.
-
It's been amazing how this crazy career has been created. I feel that it's been given to me. I wouldn't be anywhere without Victoria's Secret.
-
Whatever our bedtime was as kids, we could stay up an extra half hour if we were reading. My parents didn't care as long as I was under the spell of a Stephen King or a Douglas Adams. Now I read in bed. I read at work. I read standing in line. It's like, 'Hello, my name is Nathan and I am a reader.'
-
Part of the reason I sort of shot out like a cannon out of Michigan and left home at such an early age is because I had to feel independent.
-
The region west of the Mississippi continued in the popular mind to be a strange land for which the reports of explorers and travellers did the work of fiction, and Cooper's Prairie had few followers.
-
I have always compared our traditions of liberty, like those of Abraham Lincoln and Ho Chi Minh.
-
I went to acting school, but only for nine months. If you're an actor, you know, don't really need to learn how to do it.
-
My wife attends a Presbyterian church.
-
I don't dismiss the music that I was involved with, I don't think it was a joke, I don't think it was funny or a phase, I don't think it was just something I was doing back then, to me it was who I am. It connects all the way through. I don't distance myself from any of it.
-
I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.
-
Stopping to think is fine for characters, but not for their creators. They have to work.
-
I always felt like Tahliah's a very grown-up name to have. It's a pretty name when you're young, and then I think when I became a young lady, it felt kind of like a lot to grow into for some reason. I don't know. It sounds kind of regal. I never really liked it. I always felt like I couldn't live up to it.
-
If you're too smart it can limit you because you spend so much time thinking that you don't do anything.
-
Positive thinking is the notion that if you think good thoughts, things will work out well. Optimism is the feeling of thinking things will be well and be hopeful.
-
Marx's theories gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.
-
Clarity is so important for Shakespeare.
-
Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue.
