697 Quotes by John Irving

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.

So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.

When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it – rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.

I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there’s a construction that works from back to front.

Not every collision course comes as a surprise.

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.

The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable – some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.

Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments – responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.

The chairman of the state board of medical examiners was a retired physician who thought that President Teddy Roosevelt was the only other man in the world besides himself who had not been made from a banana.