Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Last
Beginning
Mean
Spend
Way
Writer
Think
Novel
Thinking
Pretty
Plodding
Life
Maybe
Sentence
Interesting
Sentences
Lasts
Advantage

More quotes by John Irving

Image
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
Image
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
John Irving
Image
There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
Image
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
John Irving
Image
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
Image
I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
John Irving
Image
… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
John Irving
Image
Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
John Irving
Image
Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
John Irving
Image
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
Image
You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
John Irving
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
Image
Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
Image
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
Image
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
Image
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
John Irving
Image
So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
John Irving