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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
Character
Plot
Writing
Concept
Going
Driven
People
Concepts
Begin
Novel
Becomes
Knowing
Novels

More quotes by John Irving

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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
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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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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
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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
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
John Irving
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If you asked me one day, I might say, Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious. If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, No.
John Irving
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
John Irving
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You don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.
John Irving
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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
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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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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
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
John Irving
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
John Irving
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
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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
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
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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 are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
John Irving
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving