Quote

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

John Irving

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Smart
Novel
Enough
Writing
Something
Foreshadow

More quotes by John Irving

Image
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
Image
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
Image
Imagining something is better than remembering something.
John Irving
Image
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John Irving
Image
The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
John Irving
Image
Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
John Irving
Image
I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
John Irving
Image
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
Image
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
John Irving
Image
I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
John Irving
Image
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
John Irving
Image
It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
John Irving
Image
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
John Irving
Image
The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
John Irving
Image
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
Image
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
Image
The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
John Irving
Image
And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
John Irving
Image
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
Image
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving