Quote

I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.

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
Interest
Venal
Persons
Collaborations
Best
Crass
Person
Collaboration
Many
Compromise
Must
Interests
Heart
Worst
Kind
Movie

More quotes by John Irving

Image
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
Image
Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
John Irving
Image
It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
John Irving
Image
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
John Irving
Image
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
John Irving
Image
I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
John Irving
Image
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
John Irving
Image
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
Image
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
Image
I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
John Irving
Image
Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
Image
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
Image
There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
Image
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
Image
The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?
John Irving
Image
The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
John Irving
Image
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
John Irving
Image
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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
There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving