John Irving Quotes & Sayings (Page 7)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.”

“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.”

“If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.”

“The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was.”

“I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.”

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

“So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.”