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I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice 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
Knowing
Finals
Lasts
Sentences
Paragraphs
Last
Result
Thereof
Voice
Begin
Surrounding
Happens
Usually
Paragraph
Many
Novel
Addition
Results
Sentence
Written
Final
More quotes by John Irving
I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
John Irving
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
John Irving
And never forget, there is memory.
John Irving
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
John Irving
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
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
Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
John Irving
If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country - USA - that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
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
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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!
John Irving
But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
John Irving
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
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
It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
John Irving
I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
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
There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
John Irving