John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt Jr. on March 2, 1942) is an American novelist and screenwriter.
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.
Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.
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.
It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need. . . rules.
My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
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.
But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water. . . remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.
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.
when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is always going to be trouble.
If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
Before I began The Cider House Rules, I thought I wanted to write about a father-son relationship that was closer, more conflicted, and ultimately more loving, than most. Then I began to think of a relationship between an old orphanage director and an unadoptable orphan - a kid who goes out into the world and fails and keeps coming back, so that the old guy ends up with someone he's got to keep.
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.
The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
My life is a reading list.