Literary Birthday – 1 August – Paul Torday

Paul Torday was born on 1 August 1946 and died on 18 December 2013.

Paul Torday Quotes

1. As you get into your late fifties, you begin to realise that everybody else is younger and cleverer than you are, so it’s time to move on. I thought to myself, ‘I’ll just have one last go. If nobody shows any interest, that’s it.’ (Paul Torday)
2. I’ve always managed to become involved in deeply unfashionable things. First it was manufacturing. Then I dabbled in farming. Now I’m writing novels. (The Independent)
3. The contrast between people who pray five times a day and people who shop five times a day is marked. (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
4. As I write this entry in my diary, I myself feel like a diary which has been left out in the rain, from which the moisture has washed away the cramped inky writing, the record of thousands of days and nights, leaving only a blank and sodden page. (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)

Paul Torday was a British writer and the author of the comic novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. The book was an immediate international bestseller and was adapted into a film starring Ewan MacGregor and Emily Blunt. His fiction has been translated into 28 languages and won several awards, including the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Other titles include The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce and The Girl On The Landing.

Source for photograph: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson
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