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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
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Story
Reconstructing
Stories
Reconstruction
Back
Notes
Sometimes
Fronts
Years
Front
Months
Taking
Year
More quotes by John Irving
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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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
Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
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
… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
John Irving
Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.
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
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
Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
John Irving
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
John Irving
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
(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
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
John Irving
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
John Irving
