John Irving Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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 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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The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
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I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.