Quote

The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.

John Irving

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Differences
Character
Persons
Person
Important
Always
Main
Difference

More quotes by John Irving

Image
I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
John Irving
Image
Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
Image
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
John Irving
Image
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
John Irving
Image
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.
John Irving
Image
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
John Irving
Image
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
Image
So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.
John Irving
Image
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
Image
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
Image
I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
Image
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
Image
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John Irving
Image
I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving
Image
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
Image
You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
John Irving
Image
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
John Irving
Image
Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
John Irving
Image
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
Image
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.
John Irving