A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John IrvingRead
This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Imagination can create powerful experiences that resonate deeply.
In this quote, John Irving emphasizes the profound impact of a writer's imagination, suggesting that the sounds and images conjured in the mind can often be more vivid and evocative than any real-world experience. The lesson for writers is to trust in their creative vision and recognize that their inner worlds have the ability to produce powerful, resonant effects on their readers.
Themes
ImaginationWritingCreativitySoundArt
In practice
Example use cases
In a writing workshop, this quote can inspire participants to tap into their imagination.
More from John Irving
All quotes →No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
John IrvingRead
It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.
John IrvingRead
It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.
John IrvingRead
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
John IrvingRead
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
John IrvingRead
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