Literary Birthday - 22 May

Happy Birthday, Arthur Conan Doyle, born 22 May 1859, died 7 July 1930

10 Quotes

1. It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.
2. Anything is better than stagnation.
3. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
4. My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.
5. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
6. I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.
7. Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
8. As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.
9. Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
10. The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.

Arthur Conan Doyle was a Scottish physician and author who is best known for his Sherlock Holmes novels. He was a prolific writer who wrote fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 21 May

Happy Birthday, Harold Robbins, born 21 May 1916, died 14 October 1997

I won’t leave any unfinished manuscripts. I’ll live till I’m 200 years old, and I’ll write all the stories that are in me. Put it on my tombstone: ‘He finished his job and went home.’

Robbins was an American author. He was one of the best-selling writers of all time, having written more than 25 best-sellers, and selling more than 750 million copies in 32 languages.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 21 May

Happy Birthday, Alexander Pope, born 21 May 1688, died 30 May 1744

12 Famous Quotes

1. Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
2. A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.
3. Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense.
4. The greatest advantage I know of being thought a wit by the world is that it gives one the greater freedom of playing the fool.
5. Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
6. To err is human; to forgive, divine.
7. True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those who move easiest have learned to dance.
8. Wit is the lowest form of humor.
9. To buy books as some do who make no use of them, only because they were published by an eminent printer, is much as if a man should buy clothes that did not fit him, only because they were made by some famous tailor.
10. There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit.
11. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
12. Brevity is the soul of wit.

Pope was an 18th Century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson. 

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 20 May

Happy Birthday, Honoré de Balzac, born 20 May 1799, died 18 August 1850

12 Quotes

1. A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
2. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
3. The more one judges, the less one loves.
4. If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
5. It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.
6. You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
7. A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.
8. I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
9. All happiness depends on courage and work.
10. Reading brings us unknown friends.
11. Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
12. There is no such thing as a great talent without great willpower.

Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels called La Comédie humaine, which shows French life after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Balzac is known as one of the founders of realism in European literature. His multifaceted characters are complex, morally ambiguous, and fully human.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 19 May

Happy Birthday, Nora Ephron, born 19 May 1941, died 26 June 2012

10 Quotes

1. Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
2. The hardest thing about writing is writing.
3. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
4. I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.
5. I don’t care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
6. If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.
7. Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
8. I don’t have much of a routine. I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don’t do anything. I just sort of have lunch—all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece.
9. First of all, whatever you do, work in a field that has something to do with writing or publishing. So you will be exposed to what people are writing about and how they are writing, and as important, so you will be exposed to people in the business who will get to know you and will call on you if they are looking for someone for a job.
10. Secondly, you have to write. And if you don’t have a job doing it, then you have to sit at home doing it.

Ephron was an American journalist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, producer, director, and blogger. She is best known for her romantic comedies and was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay): for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally…, and Sleepless in Seattle. 

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 19 May

Happy Birthday, Jodi Picoult, born 19 May 1966

Jodi Picoult’s Top Three Writing Tips

1. Read a ton. Reading will inspire you. It will also help you find out where you belong as a writer.
2. Write every day. Treat writing as a job. There is no such thing as waiting for the muse. If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, take writing seriously.
3. Do not stop in the middle of your first book. Finish it. No matter what. All writers go through this. It’s more of a fear of not being good enough that makes you stop. You think, ‘What if I’m not as good as I thought I was?’ Do not allow it to stop you. If you don’t finish that first book you’re making life difficult for yourself.

To read more about Jodi Picoult’s writing routine, the best book she’s written, and her thoughts on Hollywood, follow this link

Picoult is the best-selling author of 18 novels, including My Sister’s Keeper and Sing Me Home. Her last five novels have debuted at number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 18 May

Happy Birthday, Lionel Shriver, born 18 May 1957

Seven Lionel Shriver Quotes

1. I gather that the number of readers in this country is going down, while the number of people who aspire to write is going up. The best thing you can do as a would-be writer is to read other people’s work — and as an ironclad rule of thumb, never write anything that you wouldn’t want to read yourself.
2. I am a pedant. I insist that people pronounce ‘flaccid’ as ‘flaksid,’ which is dictionary-correct but defies onomatopoeic instinct and annoys one and all. I never let people get away with using ‘enervated‘ to mean ‘energized,‘ when the word means without energy, thank you very much. Not only am I, apparently, the last remaining American citizen who knows the difference between ‘like’ and ‘as,‘ but I freely alienate everyone in my surround by interrupting, ‘You mean, as I said.’ Or, ‘You mean, you gave it to whom,’ or ‘You mean, that’s just between you and me. ’ I am a lone champion of the accusative case, and so –- obviously — have no friends
3. Fiction writers don’t write about money enough.
4. Rituals — fixing cups of coffee, paring fingernails, and all manner of variations on staring blankly out the window — are all forms of delay, and therefore don’t constitute magical evocations of one’s muse, but distraction. Writing is fundamentally dull, and there are no real secrets to it: You sit down, you type something out, most of the time if you have any self-respect you throw it away. My desk? Is usually towering with huge piles of paper. This is not a mountainous topography I can promote. The piles represent everything I am ignoring — finances, magazines I think I should read but don’t really want to, and odious little tasks like filling out this very questionnaire.
5. Kevin as a phenomenon long ago ceased to have anything to do with me. I’ve published two novels since, and I’m stuck into another; fortunately, many Kevin fans have moved on to other novels of mine as well. Meanwhile, Kevin can continue to suck a lychee sadistically in front of his mother after her daughter has lost an eye without any further help from me. My starkest realisation that this novel has achieved a life of its own was while watching Ramsay’s riveting adaptation of the book.
6. I am not as nice as I look.
7. Though raised by Aldai Stevenson Democrats, I have a violent, retrograde right-wing streak that alarms and horrifies my acquaintances in New York. And I have been told more than once that I am ‘extreme’.

Shriver is an American journalist and the author of 12 novels. She is best known for We Need to Talk About Kevin. She lives in London.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 17 May

Happy Birthday, Peter Høeg, born 17 May 1957

Quotes

1. I start every day with meditation and then I write and then I meditate again and then I do the second writing stretch.
2. A novel is like a wave of tension that travels over a very long time … I think it is important not to carry with you the tension that you created in one work into the next.
3. Each new book, it’s a game for me. It’s like going to a carnival and dressing up.
4. It’s a mistake that we divide art into popular art and fine, highbrow, high-quality art.  It has no basis in reality. And it is a way to keep other people and other people’s taste at a distance. It is a way of closing oneself towards some kinds of reality.
5. I like to play with genres and to experience the thriller and the love story and to play with reality.
6. There is a day of change in the life of most authors… That is the day they go from writing poems and short stories to working on a novel and writing for several hours every day… I must have been about twenty-four or twenty-five when I reached that turning point. I’d written for years before that but had never sent anything to a publisher.
7. My first novel took four years to write, but that doesn’t say anything about the quality or the size of the novel. It was a learning piece, an apprentice book, because writing is not just a talent but a skill. It’s something you have to learn and develop. It’s a slow process. 
8. The book is the slowest art/media form. Everything else is very fast, but a book is very slow. 
9. To describe what you’ve read is like explaining music in writing.
10. There are no fearless people, only fearless moments.

Peter Hoeg, a Danish fiction writer, published his first novel, A History of Danish Dreams, in 1988 but it was Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow (1992) that earned him international literary celebrity. His books have been published in more than 30 countries.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 16 May

Happy Birthday, H. E. Bates, born 16 May 1905, died 29 January 1974

Quotable

Notice the English attitude to weather. After three weeks of unbroken sun we cry out for rain, and the relief in the air is immense when it comes. Give us three weeks of snow, a rare occurrence with us, and we are depressed for the sight of grass. Give us rain, after a drought and in three days we are crying out for sun again.

Bates was an English writer and author. His best-known works include Love for Lydia, The Darling Buds of May, and My Uncle Silas.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 15 May

Happy Birthday, Katherine Anne Porter, born 15 May 1890, died 18 September 1980

Quotes

1. If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I’m going. I know what my goal is.
2. I love the purity of language. I keep cautioning my students and anyone who will listen to me not to use the jargon of trades, not to use scientific language, because they’re going to be out of date the day after tomorrow. 
3. I have not much interest in anyone’s personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
4. Most people won’t realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
5. The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own even more, one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.
6. I prefer to get up very early in the morning and work. I don’t want to speak to anybody or see anybody. Perfect silence. I work until the vein is out. There’s something about the way you feel, you know when the well is dry, that you’ll have to wait till tomorrow and it’ll be full up again.
7. I think it’s something in the blood. We’ve always had great letter writers, readers, great storytellers in our family. I’ve listened all my life to articulate people. They were all great storytellers, and every story had shape and meaning and point.
8. Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. 
9. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence. 
10. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being. 

Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, and novelist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was a best-seller but she received critical acclaim for her short stories. 

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 14 May

Happy Birthday, Eoin Colfer, born 14 May 1965

Nine Quotes On Writing

1. Stop telling people about your idea and lock yourself in a room. Stay in the room until the work is done with only broadband and takeaway food for comfort. Writing is about inspiration but there is also a lot of work involved. Not as much work as digging a hole obviously but we like to make it sound tough.
2. I will keep writing until people stop reading or I run out of ideas. 
3. Practise – write every day even if it’s only for ten minutes. Remember, nothing is wasted. Eventually your style will emerge. Persevere!
4. I have wanted to write since I can remember, and I have been lucky enough to have had my parents’ encouragement every step of the way. I have also had the support of several English teachers who gave me high marks and gold stars. I remember several specific instances when my work was praised and I honestly believe that this fed my determination to become a writer.
5. Films definitely had an impact on my writing style. I am a huge movie fan, and the action genre is one of my favourites. I realised that very few action movies are specifically for kids, even though kids love them. So, I decided to fill the vacuum with a book that reads like an action movie. Hopefully when you read the book, the movie will play itself in your head.
6. I have a lovely office at the back of my house, it’s an old stable and you can see right out to the countryside on one side and into the house on the other side. I just sit there, put on my Kate Bush CDs and work away. I love it.
7. I would tell aspiring writers to observe. They already know it is vital to read and write whenever possible, but often people forget to watch what is going on every day in their surroundings. That is where your ideas come from. Keep one eye on your computer screen and the other on the world around you
8. Nothing is wasted; don’t throw anything away. I often meet frustrated young writers who say they’ve only got so far and just can’t finish a book. Even if you don’t happen to use what you’ve worked on that day, it has taught you something and you’ll be amazed when you might come back to it and use it again. Keep all your writing in a box somewhere. I wish I had, I bet there was at least a couple of good ideas in there that I could have used.
9. I’m delighted to be in Who’s Who, but for me, the big thing is being able to call myself a writer

Colfer is an Irish author who is most famous as the author of the Artemis Fowl series. He also wrote the sixth instalment of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, entitled And Another Thing….

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 13 May

Happy Birthday, Daphne du Maurier, born 13 May 1907, died 19 April 1989

Quotes

1. Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.
2. We are all ghosts of yesterday, and the phantom of tomorrow awaits us alike in sunshine or in shadow, dimly perceived at times, never entirely lost.
3. All autobiography is self-indulgent.
4. It’s funny,’ I noted in the diary, ‘how often I seem to build a story around one sentence, nearly always the last one, too. The themes are a bit depressing but I just can’t get rid of that.
5. Life was a series of greetings and farewells, one was always saying good-bye to something, to someone.
6. Sometimes it’s a sort of indulgence to think the worst of ourselves. We say, ‘Now I have reached the bottom of the pit, now I can fall no further,’ and it is almost a pleasure to wallow in the darkness. The trouble is, it’s not true. There is no end to the evil in ourselves, just as there is no end to the good. It’s a matter of choice. We struggle to climb, or we struggle to fall. The thing is to discover which way we’re going.
7. There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance.
8. But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.
9. You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.
10. If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.

du Maurier was an English author and playwright. Many of her books  have been adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca (which won a Best Picture Oscar) and Jamaica Inn and the short stories The Birds and Don’t Look Now.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 12 May

Happy Birthday, Leslie Charteris, born 12 May 1907, died 15 April 1993

Leslie Charteris: On Writing

1. Who knows where an idea comes from? The Saint was just originally a character who came to life in my head not so long after I started writing, but he was not the first character I thought of. He was, as a matter of fact, the fifth. I went on and created two or three other characters, each of them in an individual book. And then I suppose I got lazy, or I got the idea that it was better to continue and build up one character than to spread yourself around among a dozen. I looked back over the characters I had created so far and picked the Saint, liked him the best, and decided to go on with him.
2. I have never been able to see why a fictional character should not grow up, mature, and develop, the same as anyone else. The same, if you like, as his biographer. The only adequate reason is that so far as I know no other fictional character in modern times has survived a sufficient number of years for these changes to be clearly observable. I must confess that a lot of my own selfish pleasure in the Saint has been in watching him grow up.
3. Ever since I can remember, I have been feebly protesting against the criticism most commonly levelled at the Saint stories, which is that my plots are farfetched and implausible. It has done me little good to insist that in truth I have a rather poor imagination, and that therefore I find it much easier to steal plots from the newspapers than to dream them up. Obviously, I give them some artistic distortions and trimmings; but far more often than not the hard core of the story is something that intrigues me in real life. I have even given my sources, sometimes, which is the kind of excuse that I don’t think a writer really ought to make…
4. I solemnly assert that even when I do write a story out of pure imagination, my mind works with such a faultless sense of realism that life itself will sometimes be constrained to make my story come true.
5. Everything I write is designed to be milked to the last drop of revenue.

Charteris was a half-Chinese, half-English author of mystery fiction, as well as a screenwriter. He was best known for his books chronicling the adventures of Simon Templar, alias The Saint.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 11 May

Happy Birthday, Irving Berlin, born 11 May 1888, died 22 September 1989

Three Quotes

1. Life is 10 percent what you make it, and 90 percent how you take it.
2. Talent is only the starting point.
3. You can’t write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

Berlin was an American composer and lyricist. He is considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history. He wrote 1,500 songs, including the scores for 19 Broadway shows and 18 Hollywood films. His songs were nominated eight times for Academy Awards.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 10 May

Happy Birthday, Jon Ronson, born 10 May 1967

10 Non-Fiction Quotes

1. Discover the time of day when you write best, and write then. For me it’s about 7 am to noon. For other people it’s overnight. Try not to do anything other than write between those times.
2. Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.
3. Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.
4. Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.
5. We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we’d never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.
6. [Journalists take] the outermost aspects of our interviewee’s personality, and we stitch them together like medieval monks. We leave the normal stuff on the floor.
7. Capitalism, at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.
8. I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.
9. I crave routine and comfort massively. I’m not an adrenaline junkie at all. I only go and do these things because I have to so that I can write about them.
10. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

Ronson is a Welsh journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and non-fiction author, whose works include The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Psychopath Test, and Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries. He writes for The Guardian newspaper, City Life and Time Out magazine. He also makes documentary films and series for television.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write