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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
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Writing
Concept
Going
Driven
People
Concepts
Begin
Novel
Becomes
Knowing
Novels
Character
Plot
More quotes by 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
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
John Irving
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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
…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
My life is a reading list.
John Irving
Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!
John Irving
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
John Irving
You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
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
If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
John Irving
In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
John Irving
