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Chris Isaak (b. June 26): “The more hurtin’ the music was, the better it made me feel.”
26 Jun
“The more hurtin’ the music was, the better it made me feel. I think of that now when I write my songs. I may not be feelin’ the blues myself, but I’m writing them for other people who have a hard life.”
~ Chris Isaak, b. 26 June 1956
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Yann Martel (b. June 25): “Art is a gift: you create and then you give away.”
25 Jun
“Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.”
~ Yann Martel, b. 25 June 1963
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Salman Rushdie (b. June 19): “Books choose their authors.”
19 Jun
“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”
~ Salman Rushdie, b. 19 June 1947
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Anita Loos (b. April 26): “I love high style in low company.”
26 Apr
Anita Loos (born 26 April 1889, died 18 August 1981) was an American screenwriter, playwright and author, best known for her blockbuster comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Nine Quotes:
- Fate keeps on happening.
- Memory is more indelible than ink.
- I’ve always loved high style in low company.
- It isn’t that gentlemen really prefer blondes, it’s just that we look dumber.
- A kiss on the hand may feel very, very good, but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever.
- On a plane you can pick up more and better people than on any other public conveyance since the stagecoach.
- The rarest of all things in American life is charm. We spend billions every year manufacturing fake charm that goes under the heading of public relations. Without it, America would be grim indeed.
- There is a serious defect in the thinking of someone who wants – more than anything else – to become rich. As long as they don’t have the money, it’ll seem like a worthwhile goal. Once they do, they’ll understand how important other things are – and have always been.
- I can never take for granted the euphoria produced by a cup of coffee. I’m grateful every day that it isn’t banned as a drug, that I don’t have to buy it from a pusher, that its cost is minimal and there’s no need to increase the intake. I can count on its stimulation 365 mornings every year. And thanks to the magic in a cup of coffee, I’m able to plunge into a whole day’s cheerful thinking.
Kingsley Amis (b. Apr 16): “If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.”
16 Apr
Kingsley Amis (born 16 April 1922, died 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, and social and literary criticism. He was the father of English novelist Martin Amis.
Quotes:
- If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
- No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.
- The novelist always has favorites, and often he’s a minor character.
- Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
- It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
- Writing for me is to a large extent self-entertainment, and an only child is driven to do that.
- No writer, especially a young and unknown writer, resents publicity of any kind – whatever he may say.
- You can’t imagine how much I miss the intellectual stimulus of teaching English literature to young people. More than I ever realized – I do miss it.
- I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter. Then I go on until about eight-thirty PM and I always hate stopping.
- I’ve been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first 15 years didn’t produce much of great interest. I mean, it embarrasses me very much to look back on my early poems – very few lines of any merit at all and lots of affectation. But there were quite a lot of them. That’s a point in one’s favor.
Jeffrey Archer (b. Apr 15): “There’s no substitute for reading great novelists.”
15 Apr
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Jeffrey Archer, born 15 April 1940, is an English author and former politician. His books, starting with Kane and Abel, have sold at least 250 million copies worldwide.
Jeffrey Archer’s top 10 writing tips:
- Make time. “Decide when you’re going to write. Don’t be casual and only do it as and when it suits you. Don’t think you can write a novel after you’ve done a hard day’s work, it’s insulting to those professional novelists who spend their time doing nothing else.”
- Be disciplined. “For example, I write from 6-8am, 10-12am, 2-4pm, 6-8pm. I keep that routine up for 40-50 days and handwrite every word. I then take a break and go back to it again a month later.”
- Write what you know. “Don’t do vampires, wizards or ghosts because they’re in fashion. Jane Austen wrote about family life in a small village and gave us six of the greatest novels ever written.”
- Get some fresh air. “I go for two long walks between sessions, for two reasons, physical and mental. The plot will buzz around in your mind while you are walking, continually churning over, which it can’t be while you’re actually writing.”
- Do several drafts. “Do not imagine that the first draft of your book is the one that will be published. My latest novel, The Sins of the Father, was 14 drafts and took approximately 1000 hours.”
- Be flexible. “If you think of something better half-way through the writing process, don’t be frightened to go back and incorporate it or even change the story completely.”
- Seek opinions from professionals. “When you want an opinion on what you consider the finished script, seek it from a professional editor, an agent or someone you don’t know, through a third party. Do not seek an opinion from your wife, husband, partner, mistress or close friend. They will lie.”
- Read the greats. “There is no substitute for reading great novelists, and instead of just enjoying their craft, think carefully about how they’ve achieved it. Do they spend pages on description, do they move the story on quickly, how do they make you turn the page? It’s all there in front of you if you look carefully, so at least when you try to do it, you have analysed how successful authors have managed it in the past.”
- Stay fit. “If the body is a physical wreck – too much drinking, smoking, late nights – how can you expect the written word to be anything less than drunken, useless and tired?”
- Don’t give up. “My first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, was turned down by 14 publishers, ended up with an advance of £3,000 and on first printing took a year to sell 3,000 copies. It is still extremely rare for a first book to be a best-seller.”
Eudora Welty (b. Apr 13): “If you haven’t surprised yourself, you haven’t written.”
13 Apr
Eudora Welty (born 13 April 1909, died 23 July 2001) was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
Quotes:
- Human life is fiction’s only theme.
- If you haven’t surprised yourself, you haven’t written.
- A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.
- It doesn’t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.
- Learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
- I’m a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
- Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.
- It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.
- Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.
- Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
Tom Clancy (b. Apr 12): “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
12 Apr
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Tom Clancy (born 12 April 1947, died 1 October 2013) was an American author known for his espionage, military and techno thrillers. Clancy’s breakthrough novel was The Hunt for Red October. Ten of Clancy’s books reached #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. More than 50 million copies of his books have been sold, and three made into films.
Top Tom Clancy quotes:
- Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.
- The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.
- The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
- Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.
- Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.
- Nothing is as real as a dream. The world can change around you, but your dream will not. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it. Because the dream is within you, no one can take it away.
- I think about the characters I’ve created and then I sit down and start typing and see what they will do. There’s a lot of subconscious thought that goes on. It amazes me to find out, a few chapters later, why I put someone in a certain place when I did. It’s spooky.
- Two questions form the foundation of all novels: “What if?” and “What next?” (A third question, “What now?”, is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it’s more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if “X” happened? That’s how you start.
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