John Irving Novel Quotations

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

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.

'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.

I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

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.

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

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

I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.

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.

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them,