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. – John Irving
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. – John Irving
It’s not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I’m always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them. – John Irving
One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are. – John Irving
I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin. – John Irving
You don’t want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven’t done what I do. Most book reviewers haven’t written 11 novels. Many of them haven’t written one. – John Irving
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of. – John Irving
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. – John Irving
More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina. – John Irving
Of all the things you choose in life, you don’t get to choose what your nightmares are. You don’t pick them; they pick you. – John Irving
I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness, things being one day here and the next day not; a sense anything could happen. Then, all of a sudden, my mother met my stepfather, and her life became happier, and my life changed, my name changed. – John Irving
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. – John Irving
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it. – John Irving
When I was still in prep school – 14, 15 – I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things. – John Irving
When I love a novel I’ve read, I want to reread it – in part, to see how it was constructed. – John Irving
I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open. – John Irving
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product. – John Irving