John Irving Quotes

Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory.

John Irving

• Imagination

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• Professional golf is the only sport where, if you win 20% of the time, you're the best.

  

  Jack Nicklaus
  • Time
  • Best
  • Professional

• I think blogging is a muscle that most people wear out.

  

  Warren Ellis
  • People
  • Think
  • Muscle

• If you're doing your best, you won't have any time to worry about failure.

  

  H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
  • Time
  • Best
  • Worry

• Victorious living does not mean freedom from temptation, nor does it mean freedom from mistakes.

  

  E. Stanley Jones
  • Freedom
  • Mean
  • Mistakes

• I cannot go to Montreal without going to Beauty's, my favorite place for breakfast, where I have the Mish-Mash omelet with hot dogs, salami, eggs, green peppers, and onions, and the best banana bread in the world. It's legendary!

  

  Gail Simmons
  • World
  • Best
  • Beauty

• I believe that stories find writers, writers don't find stories. With the 'Pendragon' series, I actually had multiple story ideas and decided that instead of writing them individually, I would create a character whose journey would thread them all together.

  

  D. J. MacHale
  • Believe
  • Writing
  • Character

• Have you read 'The Grapes of Wrath?' That was my family. My dad was a sharecropper in western Oklahoma. When the dust storms came and everything got wiped out, they came to California. The guys with the mattresses on the tops of their cars in the movie? That was the way it was.

  

  B. Wayne Hughes
  • Family
  • Movie
  • You

• New York City is my favorite city in the world.

  

  Halston Sage
  • World
  • City
  • New York

• I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and then, and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other.

  

  J. G. Ballard
  • Mother
  • Hand
  • Now

• I think we are living in paradise with regards to the ways we can amuse ourselves, communicate. We have such a richness of possibilities.

  

  Ian Watson
  • Think
  • Living
  • Paradise

• We need to change America's image round the world. America has lost some lustre in terms of how folks aspire to be like us.

  

  Samuel L. Jackson
  • World
  • America
  • Change

• Period drama is such a huge umbrella term: it seems to cover everything from Claudius to something from the 1920s.

  

  Natasha Little
  • Drama
  • Period
  • Everything

• Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

  

  A. R. Ammons
  • Poetry
  • Unknown
  • Refreshed

• I can only hope that my future movies will do well.

  

  Mahesh Babu
  • Hope
  • Future
  • Movies

• I guess there are all these women with a big secret - they're hiding men they are ashamed of. They come up to me and say: 'I've been dating this guy for six months in secret but none of my friends know. I can't give him up even though he's embarrassing.'

  

  Hannah Simone
  • Up
  • Men
  • Women

• I started out doing musicals.

  

  Zooey Deschanel
  • Doing
  • Started
  • Musicals

• I developed this - I don't know, like a burning love, almost, inside of me that I just wanted to get up, and I just wanted to skate every single day and get better.

  

  J. R. Celski
  • Up
  • Love
  • Single

• In the end, crime doesn't pay.

  

  Lane Garrison
  • End
  • Crime
  • In The End

• It is not length of life, but depth of life.

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Life
  • Depth
  • Length

• What young woman is not, more or less, a mirror?

  

  Charles Reade
  • Mirror

• Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion.

  

  Karen Armstrong
  • Art
  • Science
  • Technology

• We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.

  

  N. Scott Momaday
  • Imagination
  • Destiny

• Wanderlust is not a passion for travel exactly, it’s something more animal and more fickle- more like lust. We don’t lust after very many things in life. We don’t need words like ‘worklust’ or ‘homemakinglust.’ But travel? The essayist Anatole Broyard put it perfectly: ‘Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live… in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.’

  

  Elisabeth Eaves
  • Country
  • Passion
  • Imagination

• Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory.

  

  John Irving
  • Imagination