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John Irving Quotes


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Quotes by John Irving

Showing 61-70 of 78 Quotes by 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 interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

~John Irving

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

~John Irving

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It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.

~John Irving

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'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

~John Irving

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I suppose I try to look for those things where the world turns on you. It's every automobile accident, every accident at a party, you're having a good time until suddenly you're not.

~John Irving

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I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

~John Irving

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If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.

~John Irving

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There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

~John Irving

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I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.

~John Irving

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One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

~John Irving

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Novelist

Born: March 2nd, 1942

Links

Find John Irving on Amazon

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