John Irving Quotes & Sayings

“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!”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Half my life is an act of revision.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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