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" 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 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

John Irving

Product

Process

" I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions. "

" 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. "

" You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. "

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

" 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

Background

" 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 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

I Can

Draft

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

John Irving

Freedom

Great

" 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! "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

My Life

Mother

" 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. "

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