John Irving Quotes

I actually believe in denial.

I have a very highly developed sense of denial.

I think denial's fascinating. It's a jokey word, but it really happens, and sometimes in enormous ways.

I think people, whether they realize they're doing it or not, seek out distractions to take their minds off what they know is bad behavior.

Victims don't want to know they're victims. I guess that's just victim psychology: if you don't know about it, it's not really happening.

I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.

A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young an' believing.

That's maybe the reason he does so many things so that he will not have to think .

There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.

The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.

I don't use the accident - 'cause I deny the accident

I'd chosen instead to just change my route, go miles out of the way, as if avoiding it would make it go away once and for all.

Like the ostrich, head under wingWhen the roaring storm breaks,So many people take refugeUnder the soft pillowOf specious arguments.

You can’t force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it

People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.

Denial, perhaps, is a necessary human mechanism to cope with the heartaches of life.

Sometimes people need to lie to themselves most of all.

You can see desperation in people who are too eager to laugh because they're in such a hurry not to look at what's confronting them in their lives and that's kind of sad because there's a kind of pornographic aspect to it, of making some sort of pain go away, of hovering around a pain, making yourself numb, not feel anything.

Denial can be a pathology or a survival mechanism - and sometimes it's both.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

In no way did I allow reality as it was to intrude on reality as I wanted it to be.

The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.

We know how often in our lives through laziness and cowardice we give up the battle and try to hypnotise our minds into the belief that we are brave.

I won't think of it now. I can't stand it now. I'll think of it later.

Denial is an ugly thing.