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I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Thinking
Novels
World
Suppose
Novel
Personal
Proudest
Imagination
Biography
Interesting
Richer
Place
Biographies
Think
Imagined
More quotes by 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
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
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
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
A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
John Irving
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
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John Irving
My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
John Irving
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
John Irving
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
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
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
John Irving
It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.
John Irving
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
John Irving
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
John Irving