John Irving Quotes

All my closest friends are the ones I made while in college or who knew me growing up. They keep me grounded, and I adore that about them.

Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all.

Friendship, like credit, is highest when it is not used.

If you have a friend that will reprove your faults and foibles, consider you enjoy a blessing which the king upon the throne cannot have.

Love comes from blindness, friendship from knowledge.

Friendship is like earthenware, once broken, it can be mended; love is like a mirror, once broken that ends it.

Friendship... is not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.

Women care about their friends.

I'm on backslapping terms with everyone from Sanjay Dutt to Sanjay Kapoor. That's why wives never feel threatened by my presence in their husband's lives. They know if I'm their husband's friend, I'm the wife's buddy as well.

Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship, since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters.

There is no more precious experience in life than friendship. And I am not forgetting love and marriage as I write this; the lovers, or the man and wife, who are not friends are but weakly joined together. One enlarges his circle of friends through contact with many people. One who limits those contacts narrows the circle and frequently his own point of view as well.

Friendship requires great communication.

Friends are lights in winter; the older the friend, the brighter the light.

If a relationship is going to work, it will require compromise and, even then, it is not always going to end the way you want it to.

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?

The boldest stroke and best act of friendship is not to disclose our own failings to a friend, but to show him his own.

Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.

One of the best ways to educate our hearts is to look at our interaction with other people, because our relationships with others are fundamentally a reflection of our relationship with ourselves.

A good friend is worth pursuing... but why would a good friend be running away?

Friendship, on the other hand, serves a great host of different purposes all at the same time. In whatever direction you turn, it still remains yours. No barrier can shut it out. It can never be untimely; it can never be in the way. We need friendship all the time, just as much as we need the proverbial prime necessities of life, fire and water.

Friendship flourishes at the fountain of forgiveness.

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life.

Between friends there is no need of justice.

Friendship may sometimes step a few paces in advance of truth.

That's what friends are for-to be strong for you when you need a moment to find your own strength.