John Irving

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match if you were in it for the trophies you were in it for the wrong reasons.

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

The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking ...

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.

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

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

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.

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

Keep passing the open windows.

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'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.

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 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 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'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.

Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

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.

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.

Religious freedom should work two ways we should be free to practice the religion of our choice but we must also be free from having someone elses religion practiced on us.

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.

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.

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

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.

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

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

'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.

No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.

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.

Baseball is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else.

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.

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.

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.

Half my life is an act of revision.

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.

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

It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.

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

In a living city I could never have noticed so much. Living cities dont hold still.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Men who believe in good and evil and who believe that good should win should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God

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 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.

Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.

A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.

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.

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!

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