John Irving Quotes
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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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I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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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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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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I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.
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Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
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Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you.
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My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
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I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.
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A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.'
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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.
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I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.
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I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.
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No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.
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In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
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I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.