Quote

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

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Keep
Casualties
Stories
Searching
Writing
Victims
Victim
Novel
Looking
Actually
Write
Uncover

More quotes by John Irving

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Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
John Irving
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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
John Irving
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
John Irving
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Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.
John Irving
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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
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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
John Irving
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
John Irving
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The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
John Irving
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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
John Irving
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In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
John Irving
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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
John Irving
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
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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
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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
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Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
John Irving
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In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
John Irving
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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