Writing Quotes by John Irving

Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

— John Irving

I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst and I'm not an intellectual.

— John Irving

but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.

— John Irving

“It was from just a few sentences that a writer learned anything from another writer.”

— John Irving

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

— John Irving

I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

— John Irving

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

— John Irving

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

— John Irving

I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in…

— John Irving

If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a…

— 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…

— John Irving

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to…

— John Irving

Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do -…

— John Irving

I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

— John Irving

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to…

— John Irving

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that…

— John Irving

I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of…

— John Irving

“The one critisism the author of Slaugherhouse-Five would make of the young writer was what he called a punctuation problem. Mr. Vonnegut…

— John Irving

“According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I…

— John Irving

All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we…

— John Irving

You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and…

— John Irving

“Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical…

— John Irving

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish…

— John Irving

“If you don't feel you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then what…

— John Irving

“It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if not altogether acceptable)…

— John Irving

“She was a passionate reader, and she thought that reading was one of the noblest efforts of all; in contrast, she found…

— John Irving

“When, if only for a moment, the novelist steps out of the creator's role, what roles are there for the novelist to…

— John Irving

The book works better if I know everything I can about the ending. Not just what happens, but how it happens and…

— John Irving

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook…

— John Irving

“Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every…

— John Irving

“JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN'T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT!" [Owen…

— John Irving

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never…

— John Irving

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

— John Irving

“...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.”

— John Irving

“That's okay," I said. "We're writers. We make things up.”

— John Irving

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

— John Irving

Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

— John Irving

“Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else.”

— John Irving

My life as a writer consists of 1/8 talent and 7/8 discipline.

— John Irving

“I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become.”

— John Irving