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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.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Finished
Products
Process
Must
Much
Something
Love
Presume
Product
More quotes by John Irving
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure. It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.
John Irving
I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
John Irving
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
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
Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
John Irving
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
John Irving
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
John Irving
You think you have a memory but it has you!
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
There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
John Irving
I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
John Irving
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
John Irving
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John Irving
Half my life is an act of revision.
John Irving
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
John Irving
You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
John Irving
The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
John Irving