Literary Bits for September 13

 Quotes about writing from authors born on September 13:

 

from novelist and short story writer Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio, Many Marriages, Dark Laughter) (1876-1941):

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.

Most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.

You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.

If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.

If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened.

I am pregnant with song. My body aches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away. I will tear them into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full of dark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets.

 

from novelist, playwright, and essayist J. B. Priestley (The Good Companions, Britain Speaks, Bright Day, An Inspector Calls) (1894-1984):

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.

If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write.

The point is to be good--to be sensitive and sincere.

There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.

 

from fiction writer Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, Tales of the Unexpected) (1916-1990):

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

Don't gobblefunk around with words.

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,

Go throw your TV set away,

And in its place you can install

A lovely bookshelf on the wall.

Then fill the shelves with lots of books.

Best quotes from people born July 12

 

In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.—Emperor Julius Caesar (100 B.C.E.-44 B.C.E.)

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.—philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Look wise say nothing and grunt, speech was given to conceal thought. —physician Sir William Osler (1849-1919)

You push the button, we do the rest.—George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak Company (1854-1932)

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.—agricultural chemist George Washington Carver (1864-1943)

Happiness is an angel with a serious face.—painter Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. —engineer, philosopher, and futurist Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone, you'll never walk alone.—lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960)

Tonight I can write the saddest lines/I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.—Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.—comedian Milton Berle (1908-2002)

Bonus quote from Berle:

A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong.

Literary Bits for July 5

Top 10 quotes from Jean Cocteau, French poet, librettist, novelist, actor, film director, and painter born on July 5, 1889:

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

I am a lie that always speaks the truth.

An artist cannot speak about his art anymore than a plant can discuss horticulture.

And one more:

Poetry is indispensable—if I only knew what for.

Literary Bits for June 21

 

Top 10 quotes from existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, author of L'Être et le Néant, born June 21, 1905:

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

Hell is—other people!

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Literary Bits for June 7

 

More authors born June 7:

1907 Peruvian writer and composer César Miró (Cielo y Tierra de Santa Rosa, La Mariscala, Los íntimos de La Victoria) (d. 1999)

1927 Guyanese poet and political activist Martin Carter (Poems of Resistance from British Guiana, Poems of Affinity) (d. 1997)

1935 American novelist Harry Crews (The Gospel Singer, A Feast of Snakes) (d. 2012)

1943 American poet Nikki Giovanni (Black Judgment, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, Bicycles: Love Poems)

1943 Brazilian Emmy award-winning telenovela writer Aguinaldo Silva (Império); also known for Partido Alto, Porto dos Milagres, Senhora do Destino, Fina Estampa

1952 Turkish Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk (Kara Kitap, Beyaz Kale, Benim Adım Kırmızı, Kar, Masumiyet Müzesi)

1954 American author Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine, The Plague of Doves, The Round House, The Night Watchman)

1963 Italian-born American screenwriter Alessandro Camon (The Messenger)

1966 English playwright Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and F***ing, Mother Clap's Molly House, The Cut, Over There, Ten Plagues - A Song Cycle, The Boy in the Dress)

1978 American novelist and poet Jesse Ball (The Village on Horseback, "Speech in a Chamber," Samedi the Deafness, "The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp, and Carr," The Way Through Doors, The Curfew, The Divers' Game)

1981 American cookbook author Jocelyn Delk Adams (Grandbaby Cakes)

1990 American YA author Adam Silvers (More Happy Than Not, They Both Die at the End)

1995 Welsh YA author Beth Reekles (The Kissing Booth, Rolling Dice)

Happy Reading!

LITERARY BITS: June 1

Quotes from authors born on this date:

source: www.britannica.com

poet John Masefield (1878-1967):

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky; and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain.

It's a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds' cries.

 

source: Sydney Morning Herald

novelist Colleen McCullough (1937-2015):

Best of all she liked his eyes, such a translucent golden brown, and so laughing.

...she looked like the sort of woman most men would want to get to know because they weren't sure what went on inside.

Truly God was good, to make man so blind.

 

source: freecinema.gr

poet Katerina Gogou (1940-1993):

Idionymon 3

My head in smitherings
from the vise of your flea markets

at rush hour and against the
current
I will light a huge fire

and in there I’ll throw all Marxist
books
so that Myrto never finds out

the causes of my death
You can tell her
that I could not bear the spring or that I went through a red light.
Yes. That is more believable.
Red. Tell her that.

 

source: www.wikipedia.org

novelist Michael McDowell (1950-1999):

In the hour before a thunderstorm, the color of the forest deepens: the pine needles take on a dense vibrant greenness they possess at no other time, the slender trunks go black, and the leaden sky above sinks lower by the minute.

 

source: matthewhittinger.com

poet Matthew Hittinger (1978-    ):

Marlene Dietrich remembers the night of the Marilyn Monroe Productions press conference, New York City, January 1955

 

I wanted to be that trace of scarlet lipstick

when you arrived, tipsy, a bit chartreuse

a subdued platinum angel, a white mink

 

stole. I am at heart—Come up for a drink—

a gentleman. You, a question here to seduce,

a pink thought traced by scarlet lipstick

Literary Bits: 10 Authors on Reading

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

 

The duty of literature is to note what counts and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.—Anatole France

 

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.—Arthur Conan Doyle

 

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.—G. K. Chesterton

 

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.—E. M. Forster

 

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.—Ezra Pound

 

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.—F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.—C. S. Lewis

 

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

 

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.—John Green, An Abundance of Katherines