Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
quote by John Irving
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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.
John Irving in The Cider House Rules (1985)
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To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.
quote by John Irving
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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
quote by John Irving
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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.
quote by John Irving
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I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
quote by John Irving
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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.
quote by John Irving
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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.
quote by John Irving
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
quote by John Irving
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I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
quote by John Irving
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