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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
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Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
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More quotes by John Irving
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
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
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.
John Irving
I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
John Irving
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
John Irving
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
John Irving
I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
John Irving
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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 only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
John Irving
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
John Irving
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John Irving
Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
John Irving
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
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
So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
John Irving
Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
John Irving
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
