John Irving Quotes

When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.

And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.

If every editor turns you down, maybe you should take a second look at your text, however, just in case.

I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

If you get a sense that your writing isn't quite working, change it. Or cut it out. Don't just tell yourself it'll do, because it won't.

I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.

I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.

It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.

Be prepared to fall out of love with your words. I'm still too verbose at times.

People need to be edited; life needs to be edited. I need to be edited.

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

You always want to go out there with the best book possible, so I listen to what my editors say, and even if they don't know how to fix it, I always seem to find a way. 'Trust Your Eyes' is the best book I've written, and I don't know if I can do any better.

Not to be narcissistic, but I truly believe in order to make yourself better, you should see what you did before and what was good about that and what wasn't - same way a football team plays a game and then they go back and watch film.

I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.

Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as I can, but you reach a point as the author where you have lost all perspective.

The urge to purge the material I come up with is, I guess, an ongoing process.

I'm learning a lot, and I'm trying to make it so that every time I write, it's better than the last time I've written.

How do I feel when I look back at prior work? Hmmm. I think, 'I tried to do the best I could do. It's not perfect. It will never be perfect.' And then I think, 'I want to try again.'

I don't have any problem with criticism. It's an incentive to refine myself.

I'm a big advocate of revisions, of living with something for a month and then realizing what needs changing, what was lazy, what could be better.