John Irving Quotes
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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 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 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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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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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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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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Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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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 believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.
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I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.