John Irving 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.
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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.
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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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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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On his process for writing novels: I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.
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He wrote Helen that 'a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you.'
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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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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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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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 Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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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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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.