Quotes from John Irving

All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.

I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.

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.

Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

People regard art too highly, and history not enough

She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance.

It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support; they want someone to say, "Good job."

So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

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.