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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
Years
Front
Months
Taking
Year
Story
Reconstructing
Stories
Reconstruction
Back
Notes
Sometimes
Fronts
More quotes by John Irving
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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
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
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
John Irving
My life is a reading list.
John Irving
It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
John Irving
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
John Irving
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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
Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
John Irving
Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
John Irving
In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
John Irving
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
John Irving
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
John Irving
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
John Irving
Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
John Irving
