John Irving Quotes

I love good stories; you have to have a good plot - characters which intertwine with a good plot.

I love a really good storyline.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot - my first novel, 'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,' doesn't have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to 'The Haters.'

Of course, I'm not allowed to talk about the script, but I can say it is a really good story.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

When you think of a great twist or a red herring or a way of misdirecting the reader, it is good, but you know that they are just tricks at the end of the day, and the way to keep interest is to write characters that people care about.

Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

I'd like to be in anything that tells a good story and has an interesting character.

I think a good story's a good story and a good character's a good character.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

It's always good to have a story arch.

The important thing about any book is that you have to have a good story and that it has to be exciting. Then it's nice to add other levels underneath that people can pick up on.

Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

The storyline has always been of paramount importance to me. The subject and climax of 'Phillauri' touched my heart.

The only thing that changes in my novels are the locations.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

When you're telling taut, tight storytelling that has any kind of built-in plot twist elements, you tend to want to stack everything up on top of itself as opposed to letting things breathe and be languid in terms of the passage of time.

With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.

I love the idea of trying to do the work of old-fashioned novelists of plotting and of really making you curious about what's going to happen next and all that, but also trying to load it up with your weird thoughts and opinions.

I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you.