Contact Stigmaweb's video: 1024 The Great John Irving

Part I - At Home with John Irving I don't think the news changed so much as the way its report has changed. No matter how much for personal reasons I might be tempting not to live here. I'm an American writer and I'm not sure that I would be in as touch with my subject if I lived somewhere else. I just write on my pieces of paper. I try to use two sides of the piece of paper. My contribution to the environment. By the time I was writing the "Cider House Rules" I thought, "Well, you seem to work best when you begin with the last sentence". And once I know like the piece of music, what it sounds like at the end where I am going -- I make kind of roadmap in reverse, back to where I think the story should begin and so far my sentences have never changed. Never. I see that ending and I write toward it. It's kind of waiting for me. I stopped wrestling in 76 when I was still writing my fourth novel. I mean I competed until I was 34, which is long. I think when your longevity as wrestler is behind you, but you're still hungry to satisfy you, 'cause you're never wanted more to win. That's where the temptation lies. I feel good. I had a couple of knee surgeries, shoulder, elbow but I feel fit going at 70. I can't imagine being alive and not writing, not creating, not being the architect of the story. It's in the category of my need to eat, need to sleep, need to have sex, need to exercise. I hope the way anyone who hopes to love what he or she does. I could die at my desk doing this. I do suffer I suppose from the delusion that I will be able to write something until I die. That's my intentions, my hope. Part II - Interview at the age of 67 (Advice for young writers) If I were twenty-seven and trying to publish my first novel today, I might be tempted to shoot myself. But I'm 67 and I have an audience so I'm not especially worried about my future in the book business. But I think it's much harder to be a young writer, a writer starting out today than it was when I started out, when my first novel, "Setting Free The Bears", was published back in the late sixties. Here was a novel that wasn't even set in this country, it was about the Nazi and then Soviet occupation of Vienna, not a very American subject. I remember years later asking the guy who published that first novel if he would publish that novel if he came across his desk today, this was back in the 90s, and my old friend and editor and publisher, what I saw was, he hesitated too long. You know? He waited. He thought, "Oh, God, how do I answer this one?" And then he said, "Well, of course I would publish it today." And I said, "No, you wouldn't. I saw the hesitation." And he laughed and said, "No, of course, I wouldn't." Very telling. And I think it's a lot tougher to be a first novelist, to be an unknown novelist today than it was for me and so I worry about what's going to happen with those good, younger writers. But I don't think the book is in any particular peril, I think the book is going to survive.