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" 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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" 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. "

John Irving

Empty

New

Page

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

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

John Irving

Director

Write

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

John Irving

Writing

Long