John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt Jr. on March 2, 1942) is an American novelist and screenwriter.
He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
I feel more a part of the wrestling community than I feel I belong to the community of arts and letters. Why? Because wrestling requires even more dedication than writing because wrestling represents the most difficult and rewarding objective that I have ever dedicated myself to; because wrestling and wrestling coaches are among the most disciplined and self-sacrificing people I have ever known.
The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?
Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front.
I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.
We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.
Homer and Candy passed by the empty and brightly lit dispensary; they peeked into Nurse Angela's empty office. Homer knew better than to peek into the delivery room when the light was on. From the dormitory, they could hear Dr. Larch's reading voice. Although Candy held tightly to his hand, Homer was inclined to hurry - in order not to miss the bedtime story.
When people say that German or any other language is romantic. . . all they really mean is that they've enjoyed a past in the language
If you feel so strongly about what's on television, don't have one.
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.