Literary Birthday – 29 April – Andrew Miller

Happy Birthday, Andrew Miller, born on 29 April 1960.

Andrew Miller Quotes

1. I’ll write anywhere, with anything, on anything. (The Booker Prize)
2. I want to write fiction that has no obvious message, that cannot be made smaller, that resists the single interpretation. That views morality as one force among many. That does not overly privilege love or treat it as a form of magic. That has to be swallowed whole. That neither offers nor resists consolation. That is not bound by the tenets of ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism’. That does not set out to address anything. That is intuitive, respectful, playful, ambitious and tender. That arrives out of the total human encounter, as far as that can be gathered and held in language. (Manifesto)
3. You have finished the old work, the old task, but you have not started the new because you do not know what to start. There are projects in boxes under the desk. Some of these are very dusty. You flick through them. You wonder why you thought them interesting or you remember, vaguely, but it’s not enough, it’s an old love. You are looking for signs and wonders. (Andrew Miller)
4. You go on a retreat, you take long walks. You attempt translations of Spanish poetry. You Google ‘Liminal’. You sip whisky, stay up late, confer with the neighbour’s cat who keeps you company while you water the vegetable beds at night. No one teaches us how to cross this space, this still, deep river, this grassland where the wind makes and unmakes paths. What did I do last time? But last time has gone, the spell, the password has changed. (Andrew Miller)
5. I turned over various projects, some old, some new. I thought about them. I held them up to the light. Would this one be the new thing, the fresh thing, the new beginning? I made a couple of starts, but after twenty pages, fifty, the work didn’t hold me. What does it mean to be original? Could I escape myself, the rat-runs of my own thinking? How is that done? (RLF)
6. But if books – stories – were a refuge, they were also places I came back from, a little changed, a little readier to deal with what surrounded me, to understand it. And that coming back – the rebound, the advance into life through reading and the imagination – became, in teenage years, the dominant theme. (RFL)
7. And with writing, whatever happens to you, good or bad, you have a place to sing about it. Nothing is wasted, nothing is uninteresting. As I get older I’m tempted by silence, the seemliness of not adding my voice to all the others. Let the page stay blank like a field of snow no one has walked in yet. Let peace and birdsong descend. But the moment I have such a thought I want to write about it, I’m off again. The world is a troubling and beautiful place. Writing is my way of meeting it — part shield, part embrace. Mostly embrace. (RFL)

Andrew Miller is an award-winning English novelist. He has published 10 novels. Miller has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa Book Awards Book of the Year, the Winston Graham Historical Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Ingenious Pain, his first novel, won three awards: the James Tait Black Memorial Award for Fiction, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy. The book has been translated into 36 languages. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2012. His latest novel is The Land in Winter.

Source for image: Author’s Website Credit: Abbie Trayler-Smith

by Amanda Patterson

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