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" 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
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" You can't learn everything you need to know legally. "
John Irving
You
Need
Legally
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
John Irving
Explore
Story
Tell
" 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
Me
Freedom
Great
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of. "
John Irving
Building
Never
Architecture
" 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
" I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around. "
John Irving
Child
Father
Small
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. "
John Irving
Writing
Looking
Searching
" 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
" 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 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 think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have. "
John Irving
Kind
Try
Think
" 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 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
" The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was. "
John Irving
Father
Family
Childhood
" 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
" 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
" I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions. "
John Irving
Very
Poor
Questions
" When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed. "
John Irving
Want
Love
Novel
" 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
" 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. "
John Irving
Last
Sense
See