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I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

John Irving

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
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
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
JOHN IRVING

Asking Giving Please
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
You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
JOHN IRVING

Feet Knows Needs
I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
JOHN IRVING

Adults Age Kids
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
JOHN IRVING

Nervous Not Afraid People
They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other…. or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
JOHN IRVING

Kind Thinking Together
A novel is a piece of architecture. It’s not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It’s a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
JOHN IRVING

Diaries Floor Wall Writing
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING

Art Hard Work Serious
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
JOHN IRVING

Brain Heart Poison
You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVING

Obsessed Obsession Psychology
No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
JOHN IRVING

Chiefly Lived Mind Mine
It’s a no-win argument – that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
JOHN IRVING

Environment Growth Winning
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
In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
JOHN IRVING

Scene Treatment Voice

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

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I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

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