Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
First
Story
Writing
Rather
Inventing
Write
Remembering
Happens
Sentence
Stories
Sentences
Remember
Finally
Firsts
Already
Everything
Happened
More quotes by John Irving
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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
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
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
John Irving
The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
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
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
John Irving
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure. It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.
John Irving
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
John Irving
And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
John Irving
Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.
John Irving
My life is a reading list.
John Irving
Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
John Irving
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
John Irving
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
John Irving
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
John Irving
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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
