Books Quotes
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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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
Quote by -John Irving
Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
Quote by -John Irving
The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was.
Quote by -John Irving
When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
I wasn't afraid of anything until I had a kid. Then I was terrified because immediately I could imagine a hundred ways in which I could not protect him.
Quote by -John Irving
I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
Quote by -John Irving
There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
Quote by -John Irving
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving