John Irving Quotes

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.

As a writer no one's gonna tell me how to write, I'm gonna write the way I wanna write!

if I'd thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more. But I never think of the audience. I never think of people reading. I never think of people, period.

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.

The way to write is well, and how is your own business.

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.

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

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

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

Lots of creativity is and should be solitary.

I have maintained a low profile throughout my career but have always done things in my own unique way, be it dancing or dressing up. On the dance floor, I had my own unique steps and often had to lead my choreographer.

I think as a director you have to make it your own. It'd be a mistake to approach a project with the idea of 'I'm going to do this the way I think somebody else would,' because then you'd never be clear on your idea.

I love writing, but I have that E. E. Cummings idea that as long as you stay inside the rules of your own world, it doesn't matter what it is.

Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.

I write what I want to write.

I come from quite a creative family; everyone's just doing their own thing!

I seem to have been possessed by a mind of my own and I did not merely want to be a pop product, but I wanted to be an artist which was always my ambition.

I think writing gives me creative freedom.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

Had I to give advice to writers (and I do not think they need it, because everyone has to find out things for himself), I would tell them simply this; I would ask them to tamper as little as they can with their own work. I do not think tinkering does any good. The moment comes when one has found out what one can do - when one has found one's natural voice, one's rhythm. Then I do not think that slight emendations should prove useful.

The difference of human being behind the guy on the page is in writing, I'm no longer conscious of personal repercussions because for that moment they don't exist. At times, I tell myself, Well, I can always go back and change that or take it out, and I find out that I rarely do. Couple little things here and there: Do unto others. Be a good scout. With all the ironies that entails, I go by that. That's a good way to live.

Respect is one of the greatest expressions of love. If other people try to write your story, it means they don't respect you. They consider that you're not a good artist who can write your own story, even though you were born to write your own story.

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.