Quotes By John Irving

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

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.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

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.

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

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.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

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

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.

I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.

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.

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.

If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.

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.

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.

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

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

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

Half my life is an act of revision.