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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
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Writing
Something
Notice
Really
Obviously
Write
Doesn
True
Anything
Matter
More quotes by John Irving
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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
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
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
John Irving
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
John Irving
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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
I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
John Irving
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
John Irving
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
John Irving
And never forget, there is memory.
John Irving
My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
John Irving
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
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
. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
John Irving
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
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
