John Irving Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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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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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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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 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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Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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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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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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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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Never confuse faith, or belief - of any kind - with something even remotely intellectual.
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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.