Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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. "
John Irving
Myself
Time
Better
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
John Irving
Drawing
Writing
School
" 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. "
John Irving
Group
Better
People
" 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. "
John Irving
Me
Connections
Story
" 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. "
John Irving
Better
Business
Skin
" You can't learn everything you need to know legally. "
John Irving
You
Need
Legally
" If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it. "
John Irving
Love
You
Courage
" 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. "
John Irving
Back
You
Wrestling
" 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. "
John Irving
Me
Good
Little Things
" 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. "
John Irving
Story
Ending
Writing
" I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station. "
John Irving
Will
Finish
I Am
" 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. "
John Irving
Sympathy
People
Interesting
" 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. "
John Irving
Used
Say
Old
" There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly. "
John Irving
Necessity
You
Writer
" 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. "
John Irving
Say
My Life
Talent
" 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. "
John Irving
You
Book
Kind
" Good habits are worth being fanatical about. "
John Irving
Good
Being
Good Habits
" 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. "
John Irving
Sympathy
Seriously
People
" I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them. "
John Irving
Feel
Anything
Doing
" 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. "
John Irving
Interesting
Imagination
World
" 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. "
John Irving
Attention
Details
Meet
" I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions. "
John Irving
Very
Poor
Questions
" 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. "
John Irving
Story
Sometimes
Back
" 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. I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. "
John Irving
Thought
Church
Family
" 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. "
John Irving
Me
I Can
Draft
" 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. "
John Irving
Writing
You
Ending
" 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. "
John Irving
Damn
He
Background
" The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of. "
John Irving
Building
Never
Architecture
" I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand. "
John Irving
Written
Always
Drafts
" 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. "
John Irving
Me
My Life
Mother
" Half my life is an act of revision. "
John Irving
Half
Act
Revision