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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Firsts
Essentially
First
Element
Something
Elements
Always
Characters
Quixotic
World
Novel
Uncontrollable
Control
Random
Effort
Attempting
Character
Novels
More quotes by 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
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
John Irving
You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
John Irving
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
Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?
John Irving
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
John Irving
(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
John Irving
I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
John Irving
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
John Irving
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
John Irving
So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.
John Irving
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
Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
