Top 78 Quotes by John Irving

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.

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.

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

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

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 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 get up early. I like to read a little before anyone but the dog is up. I also like to read at night, not in bed but just before I go to bed.

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

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

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.