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Writing Quotes by John Irving
- I feel more a part of the wrestling community than I feel I belong to the community of arts and letters. Why? Because wrestling requires…
- A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
- It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want…
- 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 floors and the…
- Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the…
- Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
- Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are…
- It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
- The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
- When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
- So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book…
- I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
- I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old…
- Half my life is an act of revision.
- I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
- The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
- There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
- Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
- Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
- And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known…
- I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens.…
- When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life…
- If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good.…
- The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way…
- I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a…
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More Writing Quotes
- Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt
- Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing. — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then… — Paul Auster
- When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush… — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
- A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. — Richard Bach
- In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing… — Billie Joe Armstrong
- I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know. — Andrea Arnold
- Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. — Sholem Asch
- Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core… — Isaac Asimov
- If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. — Isaac Asimov
- Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. — Isaac Asimov