“You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes...” — John Irving Quote

“You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else.”

“The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.”

“One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.”

“When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended.”

“I went to school at MIT with a whole bunch of engineers. And then I started work one day and asked myself, 'Why do all of these MIT Ph.D.s work for Harvard M.B.A.s?' Why should it be like that? I was one of those engineers who thought, 'Why are these people making those dumb decisions?' So it's fun to be the person making them.”