John Irving Quotations

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one.

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.

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness, things being one day here and the next day not; a sense anything could happen. Then, all of a sudden, my mother met my stepfather, and her life became happier, and my life changed, my name changed.

Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue.

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.

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you.

I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.

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.

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.

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.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.

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.

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.

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.

I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.

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.

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.

I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.

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.

Half my life is an act of revision.

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.

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

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.

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.

My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.

'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.

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.

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.

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.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

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.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.

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.

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.

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 principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was.

I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.

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.

So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

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.

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.

Plot, plot and more plot. Many layers to the storytelling and a huge cast of characters that are very well developed,

My principal creative pursuit is so solitary, that to be my age and have a legitimate second career in a collaborative environment is a gratification I never expected,

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them,

To her, ... celebrities at the party were not movie stars but the actual characters they'd played. Unfortunately, these movies had overlapped in her mind -- to the extent that she'd merged the plots of several different films into one incomprehensible epic. ...

Do you really want to go back to those times when orphanages existed and when many orphans were not adopted?

The inshore lifeboat was very busy with 39 jobs, and the all-weather lifeboat had 11.

Keep passing the open windows.

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me.

We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.

If you asked me one day, I might say, "Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious." If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, "No."

All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.

Never confuse faith, or belief—of any kind—with something even remotely intellectual.

but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

We invent what we love and what we fear.

We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it - and reward it in all manner of ways.

. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

Homer and Candy passed by the empty and brightly lit dispensary; they peeked into Nurse Angela's empty office. Homer knew better than to peek into the delivery room when the light was on. From the dormitory, they could hear Dr. Larch's reading voice. Although Candy held tightly to his hand, Homer was inclined to hurry - in order not to miss the bedtime story.