John Winslow Irving is an American novelist and screenwriter. Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. Many of Irving’s novels, including The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year have been bestsellers. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in the 72nd Academy Awards for his script of The Cider House Rules.
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Half my life is an act of revision.
—John Irving
Topics: Life and Living
You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
—John Irving
Topics: Passion
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
—John Irving
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.
—John Irving
Topics: Realism
The object of war is to survive it.
—John Irving
Topics: Simplicity, Goals, Welfare
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
Topics: Memory
If you care about something, you have to protect it—if you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
—John Irving
Topics: Luck, Living, Courage
If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital. If you don’t feel like you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it? If you don’t have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you are not trying to tell enough.
—John Irving
Topics: Writing
Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
—John Irving
Topics: Habits
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