Garp Quotes & Sayings

In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases — John Irving

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer - not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind. — John Irving

Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean? — John Irving

If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it's dark; he'd lose the ball. — John Irving

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything
maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all. — John Irving

Both,' Garp wrote, 'were of the opinion that the practice of law was vulgar, but the study of it was sublime.' They — John Irving

Don't worry - so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me. — John Irving

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me. — John Niven

Stewart, Jr. who was called Stewie Two, graduated from Steering before Garp was even of age to enter the school; Jenny treated Stewie Two twice for a sprained ankle and once for gonorrhea. He later went through Harvard Business School, a staph infection, and a divorce. — John Irving

There are always suicides," Garp wrote, "among people who are unable to say what they mean". — John Irving

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.. — John Irving

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane. — John Irving

But writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior. — John Irving

As Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. — John Irving

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. 'I lost one, too,' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword) — John Irving

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough. — John Irving

He wrote Helen that a young writer needs desperately to live with someone and he had decided that he wanted to live with her; even marry her, he offered, because sex was simply necessary but it took too much of one's time if one had to be constantly planning how one was going to get it. Therefore, Garp reasoned, it is better to live with it!
Helen revised several letters before she finally sent him one that said he could, so to speak, go stick it in his ear. Did he think she was going through college so rigorously so that she could provide him with sex that was not even necessary to plan? — John Irving

Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic. — John Irving

Bonkie bit Garp!"
Garp bit Bonkie — John Irving

Remember," Duncan asked on the plane, "how Walt asked if it was green or brown?"
Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile. — John Irving

Well, you finally got me, Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom. — John Irving

What do they expect of a one-eyed, one-armed artist-- and the son of Garp? No flaws? — John Irving

I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated. — Glen Duncan

You're looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see - Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don't even want to talk about "female sexuality" until there is a control group. And there never will be. — Maggie Nelson

A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself. — Nancy Kress

Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me. — John Irving

Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else. — John Irving

Under the dolls were books, a dozen or so, that her mother must have grabbed at random; she wouldn't have known which were Eleanor's favorites. Eleanor was glad to see Garp and Watership Down. It sucked that Oliver's Story had made the cut, but Love Story hadn't. And Little Men was there, but not Little Women or Jo's Boys. — Rainbow Rowell

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory. — John Irving