The Imaginary Girlfriend Quotes

“Casey recalled how Gail defended herself in the parking lot of the English & Philosophy Building from the unwanted attentions of a lecherous fellow student, who shall remain nameless. ‘Please leave me alone,’ Ms Godwin warned the offending student, ‘or I shall be forced to wound you with a weapon you can ill afford to be wounded by in a town this small.’ The threat was most mysterious, not to mention writerly, but the oafish lecher was not easily deterred. ‘And what might that weapon be, little lady?’ the lout allegedly asked. ‘Gossip,’ Gail Godwin replied.”
― John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir

“I didn’t “teach” Ron Hansen or Stephen Wright or T. Coraghessan Boyle or Susan Taylor Chehak or Allan Gurganus or Gail Harper or Kent Haruf or Robert Chibka or Douglas Unger how to write, but I hope I may have encouraged them and saved them a little time. I did nothing more for them than Kurt Vonnegut did for me, but in my case Mr. Vonnegut—and Mr. Yount and Mr. Williams—did quite a lot. I’m talking about technical blunders, the perpetration of sheer boredom, point-of-view problems, the different qualities of first-person and third-person voice, the deadening effect of exposition in dialogue, the crippling limitations of the present tense, the intrusions upon narrative momentum caused by puerile and pointless experimentation—and on and on.”
― John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend

“In schools—even in good schools, like Exeter—they tend to teach the shorter books by the great authors; at least they begin with those. Thus it was Billy Budd, Sailor that introduced me to Melville, which led me to the library, where I discovered Moby Dick on my own.”
― John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend

“I once had a brawl in a pool hall—convincingly demonstrating, although never to Nelson Algren and not in his presence, that wrestling is superior to boxing—because a fellow student at Iowa, a boxer, had called Mr. Vonnegut a ‘science-fiction hack.”
― John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend

“Hawthorne”
― John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend

“Robertson Davies”
― John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend

“Graham Greene”
― John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend

“You just go up the Hudson,” I told him. “Sure, man,” he said. “Up the what?”
― John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend

“Most self-destructive behavior is simply ridiculous—never mind how complexly compelled by personal demons.”
― John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend

“Loving long novels plays havoc with going to school”
― John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend