John Irving Quotes

My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

I like that I have kids still willing to hold my hand.

With sons and fathers, there's an inexplicable connection and imprint that your father leaves on you.

I worshipped my father.

There's no one person I can talk to and try and be as him - but the one person I want to is my dad.

I had a great bond with my father. Even when I was a kid, my bond with my dad made me want to be a father myself one day.

People say, "Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?" And I say, "I was raised like that." My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five.

When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.

Father-daughter relationship, is something that I think is so unique and it can't really be explained unless you have a daughter.

We never get over our fathers, and we’re not required to. (Irish Proverb)

And you fathers, are you so busy making a living, playing golf, bowling, hunting, that you do not have time to talk to your boys and hold them close to you and win their confidence? Or do you brush them off, so that they dare not come and talk about these things with you?

Few fathers care much for their sons, or at least, most of them care more for their money. Of those who really love their sons, few know how to do it.

The pain I felt was my father's pain.

Our fathers never leave us. Ever.

You don't buy into huge car chases or sensates or interstellar warfare, but you can buy into a loving relationship or a father-son relationship, and you can buy into the small humor. If you want to make your fiction universal, go small. That's the best way to do it.

My son is the reason why I write music. He's the reason why everything is different for me. Because when he came into the picture, my priorities changed. I can risk possibly being incarcerated because the only person pays for it is me. I know that if I'm not physically available to take care of him, nobody else will. I want to have the relationship with him that me and my father never had.

The child is father of the man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

I also think my dad would be reminding me that kids — more than anything else — need to know their parents love them. Their parents don't have to be alive for that to happen.

Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.

The Kite Runner is a story of two boys and a father, and the strange love triangle that binds them.

She looked at him and shook her head, smiled a litle as she told him, "You are so like your father." Then she looked past me and Zach, past Bex and Abby, to where Agent Townsend sttod by the door with his arms crossed. "What do you think, Townsend, darling? Isn't he just like you?" She looked at Zach again. "I think he's just like you." And then she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.

I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.

My father left me with a saying that I've carried my entire life and tried to pass on to our kids: 'Tough times don't last, tough people do,'

You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away.

I could not, as my father's daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on.