Literary Birthday – 22 December – Percival Everett

Happy Birthday, Percival Everett, born 22 December 1956.

Percival Everett Quotes

1. Deciding to write a book, it never feels like a great idea. It’s always like knowingly entering a bad marriage. If you had any sense, you wouldn’t do it, but you know you’re going to do it. (The Guardian)
2. Well, I have to do something when I’m trying to procrastinate. I usually put my procrastination off until tomorrow, though. That way I get some things done. (The Guardian)
3. People see stuff I don’t see. And I always confess that I suffer from work amnesia—people will bring up scenes that I don’t remember. I’ll have to do some work in my head to get back there. But that is not a bad problem to have. (UC Santa Cruz)
4. I write because I am interested in different things in the world. I’ve never written something hoping that it would “hit” or be popular. (UC Santa Cruz)
5. I don’t think there is an interesting work in the world that is not a failed path. That is often what’s interesting—fascinating—about literature: when does a story fail? (UC Santa Cruz)
6. That is the first thing fascists do—go after books and art—because that is where we are most human… And it is not writing that I consider so wonderfully subversive. It is actually reading, the most subversive thing we can do. (UC Santa Cruz)
7. I have to forget that I’m working unconsciously most of the time. When I go to work, I stop thinking about the philosophical things that drive me. I don’t want them to show up. (Tin House)
8. We can cover all the issues of craft pretty quickly. Setting, where does it happen? There you go. Character, who does it happen to? They’ve got to say something to each other, so that covers dialogue. My job when I go into the classroom is to disabuse my students of the belief that there is a right way to do it. (Tin House)
9. The clear fact that I choose to write fiction to make a living is ample evidence that I’m mentally deficient and that you shouldn’t listen to anything about the world I say. (Tin House)

Percival Everett is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author who writes in a number of different genres including western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire, and philosophical fiction. He has authored more than 30 books of  poetry and fiction, including Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Everett received a 2023 Windham Campbell Prize for fiction. His 2024 novel James, a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, also a finalist for the Booker Prize, won the Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Source for image: Phibeatrice, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Percival_Everett,_author,_at_the_2024_National_Book_Awards_finalist_reading_2_(cropped).jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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