John Irving Quotes

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

I've always kind of wrote when I wanted to. Once I get the idea in my head and get it outlined out, I usually just sit and write until it's done.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

I think one of the keys to better writing is releasing all of your ideas and to not be afraid. Dream big. This could be the greatest novel in the world you know.

You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.

Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.'

The point always is to be writing something - it leads to more writing.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

Inspiration comes from so many sources. Music, other fiction, the non-fiction I read, TV shows, films, news reports, people I know, stories I hear, misheard words or lyrics, dreams... Motivation? The memory of the rush I get from a really good writing session - even on a bad day, I know I'll find that again if I keep going.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

I might be into writing... I'd like to try it someday. I always come up with some good ideas.

I learned long ago, back with 'Lover Revealed,' that my job is to sit at the computer, shut up and type. Otherwise? The pictures and the voices go away!

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

I'm always writing. There is always a story brewing in my head.