A Quote by John Irving

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

John Irving

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About Before Head How Ignorance Long Lot Novel Start Takes Write Your

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John Irving
American - Novelist
Born: March 2, 1942

The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

Writing a novel is always complicated, it's not like you snap your fingers and go, 'Ah, I know what I'll write'. For me, a lot of the time, I have to write and as I write, I learn about the story.

Reif Larsen

When you write a novel, there’s a level at which you are much more revealing about who you are because you’re less self-conscious about how you’re presenting yourself. You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it’s all coming from you.

Elizabeth Gilbert

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

Tom Robbins

I don't know how to write a novel in the world of cellphones. I don't know how to write a novel in the world of Google, in which all factual information is available to all characters. So I have to stand on my head to contrive a plot in which the characters lose their cellphone and are separated from technology.

Ann Patchett

I've been writing for a long time, and I've loved comic books for a long time - forever - but I had to learn how to write in a different way to write sequential art for a graphic novel. It's been an interesting transition.

Yuri Lowenthal

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

Janet Fitch

At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of ignorance about.

William T. Vollmann

I'm working on a young adult novel. I've been working on it for a while, because I don't know how to write a novel and I'm teaching myself. For that reason, I've been reading a lot of YA [young adults], which I never have before. It's totally new to me.

Morgan Parker

It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.

Dana Spiotta

People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.

Paul Theroux

How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?

Robert Frost

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

Lawrence Durrell

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'

Kate Atkinson

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

Alice Mattison

A Quote by John Irving

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