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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.
John Irving -
I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.
John Irving
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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!
John Irving -
I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.
John Irving -
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean-make sure they know what they mean!
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.
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.
John Irving -
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
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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.
John Irving -
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
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.
John Irving -
I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful. I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs.
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.
John Irving -
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving -
Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
John Irving -
The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
John Irving -
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
John Irving -
I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.
John Irving -
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
John Irving
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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 -
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.
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.
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.
John Irving