John Irving
John Irving
John Winslow Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 March 1942
CountryUnited States of America
books full grew history lived loved russian small teacher
I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.
love
When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.
falling-in-love fall love-is
But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
lovers
You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
teacher love-you reading
I want to go on being a student," I told him. "I want to be a teacher. I'm just a reader," I said. "DON'T SOUND SO ASHAMED," he said. "READING IS A GIFT." "I learned it from you," I told him. "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT. IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT.
love wind people
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
love writing reason
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
love eye people
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
falling-in-love liars stories
Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
life courage love-you
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
cast characters huge layers plot
Plot, plot and more plot. Many layers to the storytelling and a huge cast of characters that are very well developed,
actual characters extent films mind movies party plots several stars
To her, ... celebrities at the party were not movie stars but the actual characters they'd played. Unfortunately, these movies had overlapped in her mind -- to the extent that she'd merged the plots of several different films into one incomprehensible epic. ...
fiction freedom gives great happened holds life special tyranny
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.
forming groups members ourselves people watch
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.