John Irving Quotes

Memory is imagination pinned down.

We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

Much of what we see in the universe ... starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

Memory feeds imagination.

If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space then you can make it... The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Then you can be realistic about reproducing it.

Desire is not what you see, but what you imagine.

I guess I'm not really involving my imagination to that of a circumstance or happening - I'm just kind of acknowledging it as an existence.

Memory demands an image.

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

Imagination comes in after we have experience.

The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything.

Visualization. It may be the most important part of your mental package.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.

I only know from my own personal experience, and I personally feel that there's a cyclical nature to things, so you don't want to start making generalizations about how bad things have become in comparison to the old days.

We tend to get what we expect.

The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.

Things always look better when you haven't seen them.

Romances I ne'er read like those I have seen.

An object is not first imagined or thought about and then expected or willed, but in being actively expected it is imagined as future and in being willed it is thought.

As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.