John Irving Quotes

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John Irving

Profession : Novelist

Birth : March 2, 1942

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 grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.

John Irving

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

John Irving

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!

John Irving

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.

John Irving

Half my life is an act of revision.

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

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

John Irving

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

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

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

John Irving

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

John Irving

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

John Irving

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

John Irving

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

John Irving

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read.

John Irving

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

John Irving

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

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