John Irving

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't ...
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I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14 ...
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I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world ...
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One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that ...
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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of ...
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

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.

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

As many times as I've seen 'The Merchant of Venice,' I always take Shylock's side. For all the hatred that guy is shown, he has a reason to hate in return. He's treated cruelly. And it's tragic that he learns to be intolerant because of what others do to him.

I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.

Half my life is an act of revision.

'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.

I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.

I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways, if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

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.

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. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness, things being one day here and the next day not, a sense anything could happen. Then, all of a sudden, my mother met my stepfather, and her life became happier, and my life changed, my name changed.

I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.

I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.

I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.

I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

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.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

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.

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

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 for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.

I write very quickly, I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read.

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.

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

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

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.

I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.

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 the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.

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.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

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.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

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

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

Titles are important, I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue.

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

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

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.

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

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!

You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one.

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.