black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.

John Irving

…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
JOHN IRVING

Found Safety Viruses
I’ve always been slow but I’m even slower now. I’m more into the waiting, or I guess I’m more patient about the waiting.
JOHN IRVING

Change More Patient Waiting
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it – rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
JOHN IRVING

Stories Want Writing
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
JOHN IRVING

Decision Finals Unnecessarily
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVING

Exhausting Knows Seventeen
Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
JOHN IRVING

Death Dramatic Indulgent Waiting
I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn’t terribly painful.
JOHN IRVING

Sunday Teenage Years
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
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
JOHN IRVING

Character Differences Important
Life is serious but art is fun!
JOHN IRVING

Art Fun Life
If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
JOHN IRVING

Caricatures Enough Long
When writing a novel, I’m not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don’t know what it is.
JOHN IRVING

Enough Smart Writing
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
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
JOHN IRVING

Finished Process Product
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
JOHN IRVING

Adults Resentment Teenagers
Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president’s particular agenda – and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
JOHN IRVING

Agendas Blind Presidential

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More John Irving Quotes