John Irving Quotes

God knows the times I have found myself in absurd situations.

I think everybody's nuts.

I set my monkey on the log, and ordered him to do the Dog. He wagged his tail and shook his head, and he went and did the Cat instead.

What will happen to me, as the oyster said when he very inadvertently swallowed the gooseberry bush, nobody can tell.

The Fomorians skittered backward, away from me, looking justifiably confused. I mean, really, how many human women actually run to them? And I was a human woman covered in swamp yuck, with wild red hair sticking out in matted hunks and arms flailing like a demented Bride of Frankenstein. I'd run from me.

Bizarre! That's the only word I can use to describe life sometimes. Just freaking bizarre.

Sometimes I think I've figured out some order in the universe, but then I find myself in Florida

Make sense who may. I switch off.

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.

Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.

They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly. No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried. Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked. They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone." And what difference does that make?

It was quite impossible to describe. Here is what it looked like. It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and it felt Paisley. It smelled like the total eclipse of the moon.

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?

I never seem to know what's going on... Right from the very start, my life has been strange. I think I know what happened... I must have missed all the rehearsals.

Our universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic.

Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.

What is life but a series of inspired follies.

This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.

He reached up t0 grab one and came down with several, and they kept coming, washing over him, floating all around him. Never have tampon strings seemed so beautiful as they rolled up and down with the wind, landing on the ground and then twirling and floating up again, falling and rising and falling and rising.

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?

In a world like this one, only the random makes sense.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am.

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.