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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. "
John Irving
Dog
Early
Go
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" 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. "
John Irving
Ending
Words
Only
" I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole. "
John Irving
I Believe
Mine
Believe
" 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. "
John Irving
Simple
Know
Done
" 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. "
John Irving
Follow
Analyst
Modern
" 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. "
John Irving
You
Life
Nightmares
" 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. "
John Irving
Time
Live
Shoes
" Good habits are worth being fanatical about. "
John Irving
Good
Being
Good Habits
" 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. "
John Irving
Everything
I Am
Father
" 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
" 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 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 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
" 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. "
John Irving
You
Dumb
People
" 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. "
John Irving
Believe
Story
Time
" 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. "
John Irving
Old
Think
Age
" 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
" 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. "
John Irving
Nice
Smell
Perfect
" I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described. "
John Irving
Easy
Action
Find
" 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 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 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
" The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of. "
John Irving
Building
Never
Architecture
" Half my life is an act of revision. "
John Irving
Half
Act
Revision
" 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. "
John Irving
Time
Having A Good Time
World
" 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. "
John Irving
Being Alone
Alone
Imagination
" 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
" 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. "
John Irving
Think
Interesting
Way
" 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
" If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product. "
John Irving
More
Product
Process
" 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. "
John Irving
Relationship
You
Character