Tag Archives: John Irving

No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin – only four years older than I am – everything, or what little I could discover about him. John Irving

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel. John Irving

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it – in part, to see how it was constructed. John Irving

The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was. John Irving

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story. John Irving

So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion. John Irving

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story – better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it. John Irving

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have. John Irving

Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you! John Irving

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is. John Irving