John Irving quote: "I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour."

Half my life is an act of revision.
JOHN IRVING

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The sto...
JOHN IRVING

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for ...
JOHN IRVING

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to...
JOHN IRVING

When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk t...
JOHN IRVING

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for ...
JOHN IRVING

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVING

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing bu...
JOHN IRVING

Wallace Worthington would have reminded Wilbur Larch of someone he might have met at the Channing-Pe...
JOHN IRVING

It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sy...
JOHN IRVING

Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in m...
JOHN IRVING

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The sto...
JOHN IRVING

This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, ...
JOHN IRVING

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. ...
JOHN IRVING

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a ...
JOHN IRVING

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group...
JOHN IRVING

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
JOHN IRVING

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo...
JOHN IRVING

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detach...
JOHN IRVING

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does...
JOHN IRVING

Choć już tyle razy przeżyłem mękę i śmierć Chrystusa, nieodmiennie niepokoję się o Jego zm...
JOHN IRVING

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't di...
JOHN IRVING

Life is serious but art is fun!
JOHN IRVING

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you ...
JOHN IRVING

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose he...
JOHN IRVING

Keep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVING

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things ...
JOHN IRVING

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finish...
JOHN IRVING

I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That ...
JOHN IRVING

I don't read anything electronically. I don't write electronically, either - except e-mails ...
JOHN IRVING

As many times as I've seen 'The Merchant of Venice,' I always take Shylock's side. F...
JOHN IRVING

We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
JOHN IRVING

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
JOHN IRVING

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my ima...
JOHN IRVING

I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It ...
JOHN IRVING

I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.
JOHN IRVING

I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a cl...
JOHN IRVING

When the valley surrounding St. Cloud's was cleared and the second growth (scrub pine and random, un...
JOHN IRVING

it's not god who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in him and who claim to pursue...
JOHN IRVING

If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
JOHN IRVING

If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything...
JOHN IRVING

These same people who tell us we must defend the lives of the unborn-they are the same people who se...
JOHN IRVING

It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them...
JOHN IRVING

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

Don't get your balls crossed about it.
JOHN IRVING

He had heard her say, so many times, that a society that approved of making abortion illegal was a s...
JOHN IRVING

In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be s...
JOHN IRVING

Oh FUCK the longings and agonies of youth.
JOHN IRVING

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.
JOHN IRVING

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family ...
JOHN IRVING

In other words I not only have to read that book, I have to read everything that author wrote.If you...
JOHN IRVING

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination...
JOHN IRVING

To her, ... celebrities at the party were not movie stars but the actual characters they'd played. U...
JOHN IRVING

Anyone could see we were related,
JOHN IRVING

So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like ...
JOHN IRVING

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

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I ...
JOHN IRVING

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

A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducte...
JOHN IRVING

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, the...
JOHN IRVING

don't worry - so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me.
JOHN IRVING

When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING

Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what'...
JOHN IRVING

We invent what we love, and what we fear
JOHN IRVING

Do you really want to go back to those times when orphanages existed and when many orphans were not ...
JOHN IRVING

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
JOHN IRVING

wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
JOHN IRVING

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing,...
JOHN IRVING

LAST NITE I HAD A DREAM. NOW I KNOW FOUR THINGS. I KNOW THAT MY VOICE DOESN’T CHANGE – BUT I STI...
JOHN IRVING

It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged wi...
JOHN IRVING

Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks l...
JOHN IRVING

THAT'S WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY - IT'S A BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERF...
JOHN IRVING

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. ...
JOHN IRVING

I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to v...
JOHN IRVING

He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.
JOHN IRVING

Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families ...
JOHN IRVING

when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is always going to be...
JOHN IRVING

Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow pe...
JOHN IRVING

And in our Scripture class, Owen said, "IT'S TRUE THAT THE DISCIPLES ARE STUPID - THEY NEVER UNDERST...
JOHN IRVING

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilizatio...
JOHN IRVING

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

What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don...
JOHN IRVING

Logic is relative.
JOHN IRVING

I want to go on being a student," I told him. "I want to be a teacher. I'm just a reader," I said. JOHN IRVING

Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans shoul...
JOHN IRVING

If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for tele...
JOHN IRVING

Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean––make sure...
JOHN IRVING

It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to ...
JOHN IRVING

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
JOHN IRVING

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the ...
JOHN IRVING

The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
JOHN IRVING

Never confuse faith, or belief—of any kind—with something even remotely intellectual.
JOHN IRVING

My life is a reading list.
JOHN IRVING

If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of lif...
JOHN IRVING

You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics fo...
JOHN IRVING

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't sa...
JOHN IRVING

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourse...
JOHN IRVING

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist...
JOHN IRVING

Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything els...
JOHN IRVING

If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. ...
JOHN IRVING

Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don&...
JOHN IRVING

Mother's intentions were always sound, never muddy; I don't imagine that she troubled herself to fee...
JOHN IRVING

...worst of all were the highly unlikely science-fiction novels, or the equally implausible futurist...
JOHN IRVING

IT (The country) IS HEADED TOWARD OVERSIMPLIFICATION. YOU WANT TO SEE A PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE? TUR...
JOHN IRVING

Plot, plot and more plot. Many layers to the storytelling and a huge cast of characters that are ver...
JOHN IRVING

...the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the ...
JOHN IRVING

People are like that .... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a k...
JOHN IRVING

I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sh...
JOHN IRVING

He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk e...
JOHN IRVING

My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, y...
JOHN IRVING

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
JOHN IRVING

Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.
JOHN IRVING

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The ph...
JOHN IRVING

You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to i...
JOHN IRVING

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. ...
JOHN IRVING

The lie, of course, is more interesting.
JOHN IRVING

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part,...
JOHN IRVING

I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness, things ...
JOHN IRVING

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
JOHN IRVING

I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're goin...
JOHN IRVING

Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
JOHN IRVING

All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
JOHN IRVING

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you ha...
JOHN IRVING

I had acquired an undeniable mystique - if only to the Bancroft butt-room boys. Don't forget: Miss F...
JOHN IRVING

No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and l...
JOHN IRVING

Almost none of them understood Great Expectations or David Copperfield, anyway. They were not only t...
JOHN IRVING

The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he sto...
JOHN IRVING

It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.
JOHN IRVING

My brain is sending poison to my heart.
JOHN IRVING

Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
JOHN IRVING

Grant us safe lodging, and holy rest,” Mrs. Grogan was saying, “and peace at last.” Amen, thou...
JOHN IRVING

It's natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them,...
JOHN IRVING

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the ...
JOHN IRVING

I think about you more and more, but I don't waste my time - or yours - thinking about who you were ...
JOHN IRVING

Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? ...
JOHN IRVING

Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leavin...
JOHN IRVING

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

It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
JOHN IRVING

Being wrong about important things is exhausting.
JOHN IRVING

And the thing about love," Wally said to Angel, "is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to...
JOHN IRVING

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through ou...
JOHN IRVING

… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms...
JOHN IRVING

People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
JOHN IRVING

I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and a...
JOHN IRVING

Do not forget the past; forgive the past.
JOHN IRVING

It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if ...
JOHN IRVING

There are always suicides," Garp wrote, "among people who are unable to say what they mean".
JOHN IRVING

Photographing a cake can be art.
IRVING PENN

I love the gym; I love basketball. I'm really passionate about it.
KYRIE IRVING

Honest good humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal...
WASHINGTON IRVING

One of the greatest and simplest tools for learning more and growing is doing more.
WASHINGTON IRVING

There is in every true woman's heart, a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad ...
WASHINGTON IRVING

There is certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in tra...
WASHINGTON IRVING

The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.
WASHINGTON IRVING

Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, shall win my love.
WASHINGTON IRVING

Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.
WASHINGTON IRVING

There is in every woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire which lies dormant in the broad dayligh...
WASHINGTON IRVING

Novelty is always welcome but talking pictures are just a fad.
IRVING THALBERG

A story never looks as good as when the other fellow buys it.
IRVING THALBERG

The movie medium will eventually take its place as art because there is no other medium of interest ...
IRVING THALBERG

Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.
IRVING THALBERG

Credit you give yourself is not worth having.
IRVING THALBERG

Strange story about Degas. He hated women, didn't want to be with them. Yet he spent much of his...
IRVING STONE

The biographical novel sets out to document this truth, for character is plot, character development...
IRVING STONE

The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being's journey across the fa...
IRVING STONE

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to s...
IRVING STONE

In the biographical novel, there's only one person involved. I, the author, spend two to five ye...
IRVING STONE

My goal always is to tell a universal story, meaning it's about a person who has an idea, a visi...
IRVING STONE

My books are based 98 percent on documentary evidence.
IRVING STONE

I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the inte...
IRVING STONE

I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the reli...
IRVING STONE

I slept in van Gogh's bed. I worked in the room where he painted. I saw the place where he was c...
IRVING STONE

There's nothing romantic about my work... I don't believe in inspiration. I believe that you...
IRVING STONE

Even if there is endless documentation, it would be impossible to know what a man thought inside his...
IRVING STONE

I've tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I've failed. I've tried ...
IRVING PENN

Over the years I must have spent thousands of hours silently brushing on the liquid coatings, prepar...
IRVING PENN

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.
IRVING PENN

I am a professional photographer because it is the best way I know to earn the money I require to ta...
IRVING PENN

Liberman said to me, 'I must cut back on the work you do for Vogue. The editors don't like i...
IRVING PENN

I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn't go to...
IRVING PENN

I have always stood in awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius...
IRVING PENN

Using simple equipment and daylight alone is for me a pleasure and a replenishment.
IRVING PENN

Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue....
IRVING PENN

The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously inter...
IRVING PENN

I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photogra...
IRVING PENN

My neighbor doesn't want to be loved as much as he wants to be envied.
IRVING LAYTON

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and K...
IRVING LAYTON

We love in another's soul whatever of ourselves we can deposit in it; the greater the deposit, t...
IRVING LAYTON

People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its...
IRVING KRISTOL

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
IRVING KRISTOL

Perhaps anti-depressants should be best reserved for the very extreme cases and, more importantly, f...
IRVING KIRSCH

If doctors just spent more time with their patients so they felt more reassured, that might help.
IRVING KIRSCH

There seems little reason to prescribe anti-depressant medication to any but the most severely depre...
IRVING KIRSCH

If you're taking an antidepressant, it's working, and you're not experiencing side effec...
IRVING KIRSCH

Patients who trust their doctors and have a psychological expectation of getting better could trigge...
IRVING KIRSCH

Depression comes back over time in about 90 percent of people on antidepressants. Studies show that ...
IRVING KIRSCH

Nocebos often cause a physical effect, but it's not a physically produced effect. What's the...
IRVING KIRSCH

Anything that instills a sense of hope will at least temporarily help treat depression.
IRVING KIRSCH

There seem to be many causes of depression. One cause is profound loss, grief. Economic hardship we ...
IRVING KIRSCH

Psychotherapy works, and some types of therapy have been shown to be much more effective than antide...
IRVING KIRSCH

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.

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John Irving

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.

John Irving

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