American - Novelist | March 2, 1942 -
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
John Irving
LifeLoveLiveCourageEnoughYou
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.
LearningLiveTimeShoesSchoolYou
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.
LifeYouChooseThingsNightmares
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.
LifeTalentMeMy LifeSayKind
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.
AloneImaginationBeing AloneMeKid
Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
GoodWorthBeingHabitsGood Habits
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!
MemoryThinkYouForgetWillOwn
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.
GoodCharacterTimeBelieveBetter
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
LegalLearnYouKnowNeedLegally
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.
LifeDaySchoolMeWritingDrawing
Half my life is an act of revision.
LifeMy LifeActHalfRevision
My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
AnimalMeWritingLongNewWant
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