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
kids age stories
I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
worst-case-scenario stories kind
I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
rumor care stories
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.
writing stories want
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
character stories fans
I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
stories remember imagine
Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.
years stories months
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.
writing stories victim
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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.
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.
writer
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.