Books Quote by John Irving

“writing a novel is extremely complicated. So complicated, in fact, that you cannot possibly hold your entire novel in your head all at once.…

— Nathan Bransford

“Just because it's a novel--can't it also be different?”

— John Deaton

“...novels do not begin the way you want them to, but the way they want to.”

— Gabriel García Márquez

“few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“I wanted every novel I have ever read to end with a true beginning.”

— Adalet Ağaoğlu

“A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.”

— George Saunders

“Sometimes the most obvious solution also happens to be the right one: after all, life isn't a novel.”

— Maurizio de Giovanni

“If this were a novel, you'd have to start a new chapter as soon as I appeared.”

— Jasper Fforde

“Misunderstanding and distrust—the predominant elements of a novel. Without them, everyone lives happily from beginning.”

— Carmen DeSousa

“To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after.”

— Thomas Harris

“I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what…

— Anne Tyler

“Better that the book should be not quite so good, and the writer better, and not himself a ridiculous contrast to all he has…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson