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John Irving Quotes


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Quotes by John Irving

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If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

~John Irving

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With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

~John Irving

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Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you.

~John Irving

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Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

~John Irving

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Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

~John Irving

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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 to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

~John Irving

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I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.

~John Irving

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I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me.

~John Irving

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Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

~John Irving

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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 solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

~John Irving

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Novelist

Born: March 2nd, 1942

Links

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