John Irving Quotes
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But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see.
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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.
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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.
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I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.
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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.
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If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
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Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean-make sure they know what they mean!
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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.
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I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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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.
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Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
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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.
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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.
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The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.