Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story … - John Irving

Same topic Authors

Quote of the day

There have been many instances of people combining the political life with the spiritual life, a life of constant self-examination. Gandhi was a great example of that.

John Irving

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

Begin, Falling In Love, Liars, Ordinary, Sentence

Same Author Quotes

I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.

Moving, Mean, Expression, Woman, Said

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

Fanatical, Generosity, Good Habits, Habit, Habits, Worth

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

Kill, Notice, Owen Meany, Tax, Taxes, Way

My life is a reading list.

Life, Life Is, List, Lists, Reading

I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.

Angry, Emotional, Passionate, Silly, Style, Vonnegut