black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

John Irving

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
JOHN IRVING

Alive Hero Trying
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too.
JOHN IRVING

Abortion Choice Choices Freedom
The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
JOHN IRVING

Husband Oxygen Thinking
You can’t say you’re going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We – Americans – permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
JOHN IRVING

Country Names Play
A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
JOHN IRVING

Boiled Life Sentences
In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
JOHN IRVING

Energy Father Grandmother
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can’t even remember having met you
JOHN IRVING

Memorable Running Thinking
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
JOHN IRVING

Creative Maps Writing
There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
JOHN IRVING

Aware Constantly Reason
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
JOHN IRVING

People Sound Trying
And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won’t forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
JOHN IRVING

Book Memories Tears
No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen…You shouldn’t have a baby if there’s no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
JOHN IRVING

Baby Hands Moving
I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.
JOHN IRVING

Exercise Sex Sleep Writing
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
JOHN IRVING

Beginning Ends Grows Growth
A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
JOHN IRVING

Jobs Memories Writing
If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
JOHN IRVING

Caricatures Enough Long

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More John Irving Quotes