Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Difference
Differences
Character
Persons
Person
Important
Always
Main
More quotes by John Irving
The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
John Irving
…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
John Irving
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
John Irving
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
John Irving
I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
John Irving
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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
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
Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
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
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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
You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
John Irving
Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
