John Irving

Citations

• “Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”

• “Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either.”

• “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”

• “To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.”

• “Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”