Books Quotes
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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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
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.
Quote by -John Irving
I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.
Quote by -John Irving
I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.
Quote by -John Irving
I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.
Quote by -John Irving
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
Quote by -John Updike
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
Quote by -John Updike
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
Quote by -John Updike
The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.
Quote by -John Updike
A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.
Quote by -John Updike
Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.
Quote by -John Updike
I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.
Quote by -John Updike
Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.
Quote by -John Updike
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
Quote by -John Updike
A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.
Quote by -John Updike
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
Quote by -John Updike
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
Quote by -John Updike
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'
Quote by -John Updike
My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.
Quote by -John Updike
I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.
Quote by -John Updike
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.
Quote by -John Updike
My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.
Quote by -John Updike
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
Quote by -John Updike
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.
Quote by -John Updike
We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.
Quote by -John Updike
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
Quote by -John Updike
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
Quote by -John Updike
I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.
Quote by -John Updike
I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'
Quote by -John Updike
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
Quote by -John Updike
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.
Quote by -John Updike
When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.
Quote by -John Updike
When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.
Quote by -John Updike
There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.
Quote by -John Updike