Top 40 John Irving Quotes

I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.

I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.

I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you’ll recognize that and make the necessary revisions.

The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was.

I don’t read anything electronically. I don’t write electronically, either – except e-mails to my family and friends. I write in longhand. I have always written first drafts by hand, but I used to write subsequent drafts and insert pages on a typewriter.

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

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.

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

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.

I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.

It’s not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I’m always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.

Half my life is an act of revision.

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.

As many times as I’ve seen ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ I always take Shylock’s side. For all the hatred that guy is shown, he has a reason to hate in return. He’s treated cruelly. And it’s tragic that he learns to be intolerant because of what others do to him.

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.

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.

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.

When I love a novel I’ve read, I want to reread it – in part, to see how it was constructed.

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

I believe in rules of behavior, and I’m quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels – not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I’m not a twentieth-century novelist, I’m not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I’m old-fashioned, a storyteller. I’m not an analyst, and I’m not an intellectual.

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.

I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it’s like to live in someone else’s shoes.

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.

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.

I think there is often a ‘what if’ proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

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.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It’s when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

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.

I don’t think I’ve had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me.

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.

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.