John Irving Quotes

I didn't know a time when there wasn't a war because I spent all my time from the age of two or three to eight in a coal cellar really.

I was traumatized by the cartoon version of 'The Hobbit.' It's not supposed to be scary, I don't think, but literally I think that's the most scared I've ever been.

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

Pearl Harbor was the defining event in my life. It shaped who I am, and all of my hang-ups and my drives, I think, stem from that.

I slept with my mom until I was 16 years old.

There is a psychic cost children bear when they grow up in fear.

Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.

I had to deal with death at a really young age.

Bambi, to a kid, was scary.

When there's an adult person who's scaring you, you grow up pretty quickly.

I have a theory that there are still parts of our mental worlds that are still based around the age of between five and eight, and we just kind of pretend to be grown-up.

I began to speak well at a very advanced age - 15, 16, 17 years old. It was psychological: the trauma of war, my family and growing up on my own. I was more or less a street kid.

My childhood was so traumatic.

As much as 'It Chapter One' is a movie about friendship and the power of unified belief, the second part is more about trauma.

I don't think it's healthy to have 68-year-old men, 70-year-old men thinking regularly about a traumatic experience that happened to them and thinking that they cannot talk about it with anybody, and no one wants to listen.

The most profound memory I have from my childhood is burning down my house at 6 years old.

I'm a child who was abused. I know the difference. I clearly know the difference. The whipping for correction and then their child abuse.

I had proof that I had five senses, that I knew how to get myself to function! And then I lost my childhood.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

Folks working late, I had a babysitter. I ain't about to sit here and name her. I was almost 8 when she came in late, woke me up with a game to play. Did a few things that it's hard to say. Told me to keep that secret safe. I'm trying to act like it ain't real. Had my innocence just stripped from me, and I still don't know how to feel.

No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.

No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-room: it only gave my nerves a shock, of which I feel the reverberation to this day.

Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.