QUOTES by John Irving
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I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.
Quote by -John Irving
I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.
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I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.
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There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
Quote by -John Irving
I had a particular affinity for wrestling, and it did have a lot to do with being small and being combative - and being angry. And when you're small and you don't back down, you get in a lot of fights.
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I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.
Quote by -John Irving
Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
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Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.
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I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.
Quote by -John Irving
My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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I suppose I try to look for those things where the world turns on you. It's every automobile accident, every accident at a party, you're having a good time until suddenly you're not.
Quote by -John Irving
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
Quote by -John Irving
There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
Quote by -John Irving
I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
Quote by -John Irving
As many times as I've seen 'The Merchant of Venice,' I always take Shylock's side. For all the hatred that guy is shown, he has a reason to hate in return. He's treated cruelly. And it's tragic that he learns to be intolerant because of what others do to him.
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If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
Quote by -John Irving
I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me.
Quote by -John Irving
I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.
Quote by -John Irving
I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.
Quote by -John Irving
I wasn't afraid of anything until I had a kid. Then I was terrified because immediately I could imagine a hundred ways in which I could not protect him.
Quote by -John Irving
I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
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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.
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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.
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The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
Quote by -John Irving
I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.
Quote by -John Irving
I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read.
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'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
Quote by -John Irving
I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions.
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When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.
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The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was.
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Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
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I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
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No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.
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You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
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I get up early. I like to read a little before anyone but the dog is up. I also like to read at night, not in bed but just before I go to bed.
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I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.
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I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.
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It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.
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When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
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I don't read anything electronically. I don't write electronically, either - except e-mails to my family and friends. I write in longhand. I have always written first drafts by hand, but I used to write subsequent drafts and insert pages on a typewriter.
Quote by -John Irving