John Irving Quotes

Friendship should be more than biting time can sever.

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love.

I'm pretty intense when it comes to relationships, platonic ones as well. If I feel a connection with someone, I'm willing to go there.

Presents don't really mean much to me. I don't want to sound mawkish, but - it was the realization that I have a great many people in my life who really love me, and who I really love.

Some of the choicest blessings of my life have been the close friendships I have experienced over the years. Often, these friendships have been forged in the fires of shared experience.

A relationship will be futile if it's based just on physicality. Intellectual stimulation is a must for me.

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.

Friendship is a thing most necessary to life, since without friends no one would choose to live, though possessed of all other advantages.

I think if you look at the friends, the kinds of relationships I have, I am not the kind of guy who has many shallow relationships. I think you could say I am the kind of guy who has a few relationships, but those are very deep.

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.

Friendship's full of dregs.

More and more do I feel, as I advance in life, how little we really know of each other. Friendship seems to me like the touch of musical-glasses--it is only contact; but the glasses themselves, and their contents, remain quite distinct and unmingled.

I want to talk to him. I want to ask him about that girl and if he loved her and still misses her. Nothing, however, exits my mouth. How well do we really let ourselves know each other? There's a long quietness until I finally break it open. It reminds me of someone breaking bread and handing it out. In my case, I hand out a question to my friend.

We never exchange more than three words with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise.

The proper way to create friends is to have a warm heart, not simply money or power. The friend of power and the friend of money are something different.

I have no friends, there are only people I love.

Friendship is made up of esteem and pleasure; pity is composed of sorrow and contempt: the mind may for some time fluctuate between them, but it can never entertain both at once.

Sometimes I feel I know strangers Better than I know my friends Why must a beginning Be the means to an end? The stones from my enemies These wounds will mend But I cannot survive The roses from my friends.

If you're looking for friends when you need them...it's too late.

Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.

Freindshipp is beyond all relations of flesh and blood, because it is less materiall.

Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company for very long.

Friendship freely given and gratefully received is one of life's greatest gifts.

If books are not good company, where shall I find it?

One who's our friend is fond of us; one who's fond of us isn't necessarily our friend.