John Irving Quotes

There are times when directors just don't know what they're doing.

When you are young, you do a lot of stupid things.

If people do things without thinking them through, that rubs me up the wrong way.

Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity.

Sometimes when you're young and a little more immature, you can overdo things or not really have your legs under you.

I don't know if there were many pros for me playing early. I feel like I dug myself a pretty deep hole that rookie year.

Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles, which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn.

A monkey was carrying two handfuls of peas. One little pea dropped out. He tried to pick it up, and split twenty. He tried to pick up the twenty, and split them all. Then he lost his temper, scattered the peas in all directions and ran away

Guys do dives because they don't know how to work. Guys do flips because they don't know how to work.

I think you jump into things without thinking ahead very much because I had never been in an airplane - even in a commercial airliner. I had never flown at all. I just wanted to be commissioned, to be a commissioned officer.

When you're young, you're cocky.

In the heat of the moment things get blown out of hand.

I have to accept the trouble I've got into, a lot of it has been either decisions I've made or probably not thought long and hard enough about.

You don't understand what you're angry about as a young man. You have those young man blues.

We've entrusted our lives to people who know nothing about life.

There's no glamour in stupid mistakes.

I can be quite fiery. I was worse when I was younger but even now, when there is a bad decision from... it doesn't matter who, I sometimes want to scream.

I was fairly rubbish as a player.

I was pretty immature, and some of it came from just wanting to have fun.

I'm just stupid and too headstrong.

Most people can do nothing at all well

If we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance.

Jump in a hole without looking, and there'll be a snake in it every time.

Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit to be a much better thing than experience; which they call coldness. They are but half mistaken; for though spirit without experience is dangerous, experience without spirit is languid and ineffective.

Rash, inexperienced youth holds itself a chosen instrument, and allows itself unbounded license.