A Quote by John Irving

I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

John Irving

Quote Topics

Believe Capable Complicated I Believe Involved Making Novel Should

Quote Author

John Irving
American - Novelist
Born: March 2, 1942

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

No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

Pearl S. Buck

It is necessary that... we should believe that we are as capable of producing great art as we believe we are capable of doing great deeds.

Arthur Lismer

I think there are a lot of people who are involved in the Tea Party who have very real and sincere concerns about spending that's out of control or generally philosophically believe that the government should be less involved in certain aspects of American life rather than more involved. And they have every right and obligation as citizens to be involved and engaged in this process.

Barack Obama

"Believe in yourself" - that makes sense. You should believe in yourself - you should believe that you're capable of great things - but you would hope that somebody would have some sort of self-awareness.

Timothy Simons

I believe strongly that characters are five-dimensional, and they're complicated, and life is complicated, and people are complicated.

Lee Daniels

I'm capable of making $44 million. I know I'm intellectually capable of finding a series of things and making hundreds of millions. I have to get there and do it. Carefully. Legally.

Jack Abramoff

A Complicated Kindness is just that: funny and strange, spellbinding and heartbreaking, this novel is a complicated kindness from a terrifically talented writer.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz

After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.

Harmony Korine

A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

Azar Nafisi

A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.

Anthony Marra

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

Elizabeth Kostova

I have been a Christian all my life, but it's impossible to be so deeply involved in these stories without it making you think again, and without it making you consciously aware of the people involved.

Della Reese

One should cultivate good habits of memory, for it is capable of making existence a Paradise or an Inferno.

Baltasar Gracian

'Emma' is my favorite Jane Austen novel - one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong.