Books Quotes by John Irving

My life is a reading list.

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

“Someone who hasn't read a novel doesn't really know what it's about, William.”

— John Irving

I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

— John Irving

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

— John Irving

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

— John Irving

“And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.”

— John Irving

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

— 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

“The operas I loved were nineteenth-century novels!”

— John Irving

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.

— John Irving

“A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems…

— John Irving

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

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

— John Irving

“Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to…

— John Irving

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she…

— John Irving

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…

— 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

Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before…

— 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

“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties." (Interview…

— John Irving

“On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to…

— John Irving

I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have…

— 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

“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

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

“Because of A Prayer for Owen Meany, many of my readers assume I am “religious.” I go to church only occasionally—like a…

— John Irving

“Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was…

— 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

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

— John Irving

“But the penultimate paragraph of the novel is naturally the passage I wrote first. “When we held Owen Meany above our heads,…

— John Irving

“while we waited to see what God would do. I heard a tear fall—it was one of my grandmother’s tears, and I…

— John Irving

It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen…

— John Irving

Along the (writing) way accidents happen, detours get taken... But these are not "divine" accidents; I don't believe in those. I believe…

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

— John Irving

“Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?”

— John Irving

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

— John Irving

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

— 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