John Irving Quotes

'Glass Sword' has several set piece scenes that I plotted out or visualized before I wrote them, but I always knew they were coming. They anchor bits of the story.

But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I've got to figure out how this book's going to end. Otherwise, you're going to write yourself into so many dead-ends.

Endings don't have anything to do with what your movie is about. Now, there is an emotional climax, there's an emotional resolution that is 100 percent important. If I get that wrong, get your money back.

I usually have a sense of where my characters are personally and ways in which they might transform throughout the novel. But I never know at the outset how the book will end, nor do I ever stick to my original plan.

Every story is organic, and every story finds its own ending.

I never start a section of the story without knowing how it will end. I also consciously try to shape the story as though it were a movie.

To come up with the ending to a story and then work backwards is like tying your shoe with one hand only.

I don't think they knew exactly where they were going with the character, but they lay those stories out ahead of time, so they had some idea where they wanted it to go.

I'm going to have to class 'True Detective''s first season with so many other shows that were great until the final episode(s) and then lost their way. I still love this show, but I would have preferred no ending at all to this one.

It's often the case that the most strained moments in books are the very beginning and the very end - the getting in and the getting out. The ending, especially: it's awkward, as if the writer doesn't know when the book is over and nervously says it all again.

I enjoy a third act, and I like stories with ending. A lot of my frustration with serialized storytelling is a lot of shows don't have a third act. They have an endless second act, and then they find out it's their last year and often have to hustle to invent a third act, but they were never necessarily organically meaning to begin with.

I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually not as important as they're sometimes given credit for.

The main thing for me is I really like strong endings. If there's a strong ending, you can take more time in the beginning, your first act can be really quite different.

I like books that have razor-sharp plotting that snaps and moves along. It's not about the main character being different at the end. I don't want my main character to be different in the end. I still want him committed to his ideas, to be steadfast, true and loyal.

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

You do a film and you know where you're going, you have this material to stretch and play with as much as possible because you know how it ends.

The great thing about a trilogy is that it feels like you've got a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I always love writing the third book in a series because you get to tie up all the threads that you put out in the first two books. You finally let people know what really happens and reveal all the secrets and bring certain characters together.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

The nice thing about a series is you can end on cliffhangers all the time. You can be like, 'You know what? Here we go, this person just died, end of book.' And with the end of the series, you're very conscious of all the plotlines that were left hanging. There's a balance there to wrap those up but still leave it exciting.

The challenge is always to find the good place to end the book. The rule I follow with myself is that every book should end where the next book would logically begin. I know that some readers wish that literally all of the threads would be neatly tied off and snipped, but life just doesn't work that way.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

I think stories do have an ending. I think they need to have an ending eventually because that is a story: a beginning, middle and end. If you draw out the end too long, I think storytelling can get tired.

I can't say that the ending of a story is always the best part of the story, and yet there's sort of this implicit idea that the finale is somehow supposed to be the mind-blowing best episode of a show. The question is: Why is that? Why do people make that assumption?

You don't have to resolve every problem of the book at the end, but you do have to resolve some.