Novel Quotes by 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

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

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

— John Irving

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

— 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

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

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

— 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

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

— John Irving

I'm not typing. I write only by longhand. I've always written first drafts by hand and then once I was into a…

— 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

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

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the…

— John Irving

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo.…

— John Irving

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other…

— John Irving

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to…

— 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

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

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.

— John Irving

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new…

— John Irving

In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel,…

— John Irving

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer…

— John Irving

A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and…

— 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

I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was…

— John Irving

The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that…

— John Irving

You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason…

— John Irving

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of…

— John Irving

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to…

— John Irving

The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are…

— John Irving

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that…

— John Irving