John Irving Quotes

I mean, if you lined up 100 writers, you'd get 100 different ways in which they write. There's no right way or wrong way to do it; it's whatever your process is.

I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

Sometimes it can be really exciting, but I avoid the blank page now. What I do is hand write everything. When you're hand writing, there's never a blank page, really. There's so much you can do with that.

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

Gather knowledge about the craft of writing. Immerse yourself in the art of it. Then write. Write yourself silly. Write yourself mad. Write yourself blind. Trust the excitement that builds within you when the idea is good and the writing is superb. You can do it, but that's the hell of it as well as the exultation of it. You have to do it.

My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty - wherever they are - and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

I think that's great - I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.

There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.

When aspiring writers ask me about how they should target their writing, I tell them to pay no attention to that kind of thing. It will restrict you. You will end up falling into stereotypes in an effort to tailor your work toward a perceived genre category.

Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.

I find it both fascinating and disconcerting when I discover yet another person who believes that writing can't be taught. Frankly, I don't understand this point of view.

People say you can't teach writing, but I think that's nonsense.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

Listen to advice. You don't know how many writer's conferences I've taught at where at least half the audience fights all the conventions of the field.

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.