John Irving Quotes

It's all about letting the story take over.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

Getting to share the stories in my head with other people and have them enjoy those stories, and having them come to see my characters as real. That's so cool.

All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.

I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.