Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

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

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

John Irving

Director

Write

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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

Connections

Story

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

" 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. "

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

John Irving

What If

Think

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "