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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Multiple
Questions
Record
Choice
Records
Choices
Poor
More quotes by 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
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
John Irving
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
John Irving
It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support they want someone to say, Good job.
John Irving
It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
John Irving
Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
John Irving
Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!
John Irving
And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
John Irving
There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
John Irving
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
John Irving
In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
John Irving
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.
John Irving
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
John Irving