Quotes from ‘The World According to Garp’ by John Irving

- Women seem “better equipped than men at enduring fear and brutality, and at containing the anxiousness of feeling how vulnerable we are to the people we love” 

- A book feels true when it feels true.. a book’s true when you can say, “Yeah! That’s just how damn people behave all the time”. Then you know it’s true 

- In the end, death separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories 

- Professionally, personally or artistically, “you only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else” 

- Horace Walpole once said that the world is comic to those who think and tragic to those who feel 

- I don’t blame you. I don’t blame me either. Only in this way can we be whole again. 

- He tried to remember what had enabled him to imagine that first sentence of ‘The Pension Grillparzer.’

‘My father worked for the Austrian Tourist Bureau.’

Where had it come from? He tried to think of sentences like it. What he got was a sentence like this: ‘The boy was five years old; he had a cough that seemed deeper than his small, bony chest.’ What he got was memory, and that made muck. He had no pure imagination anymore.

- Imagining something is better than remembering something 

- “It is about the fear of death, I think,” Colin began. “Maybe more accurately, the fear of the death of children - or of anyone you love”... John Irving’s son on what the book was “about”

- It is a novel about being careful, about about that not being enough 

- I’m just a father with good imagination. In my imagination I lose my children everyday