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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

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Ignorance
Novel
Takes
Head
Start
Write
Writing
Long

More quotes by John Irving

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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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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
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
John Irving
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In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
John Irving
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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving
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I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
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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.
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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
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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.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
John Irving
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
John Irving
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving