Here's what authors born on this date write about
the craft of writing and books:
Louis L'Amour, born March 22, 1908:
People are forever asking me where I get my ideas, but
one has only to listen, to look, and to live with awareness... All men look, but
so few can see. It is all there, waiting for the passerby.
Start writing, no matter about what. The water does
not flow until the faucet is turned on. You can sit and look at a page for a
long time and nothing will happen. Start writing and it will.
If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but
a waiter.
Books are the building blocks of civilization, for
without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own
brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.
A book is less important for what it says than for
what it makes you think.
Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act
of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river
without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the
desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest
restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild
country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a
raiding party.
I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their
beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book,
nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but
I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of
lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an
inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of
time.
James Patterson, born March 22, 1947:
I'm big on having a blistering pace. That's one of the
hallmarks of what I do, and that's not easy. I never blow up cars and things
like that, so it's something else that keeps the suspense flowing. I try not to
write a chapter that isn't going to turn on the movie projector in your head.
A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or
their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody
is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that
they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.
You see, one of the best things about reading is that
you'll always have something to think about when you're not reading.
