Quotes from John Irving

Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!

It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

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

If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.

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.

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue.

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

We invent what we love and what we fear.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?

…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

Safer than we are." I told Franny. "Safer than love." "let me tell ya kid," Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. "Everything's safer than love.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.

I had a particular affinity for wrestling, and it did have a lot to do with being small and being combative - and being angry. And when you're small and you don't back down, you get in a lot of fights.

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.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.