Author Birthday – 17 October – Patrick Ness

Happy Birthday, Patrick Ness, born on 17 October 1971.

Patrick Ness Quotes

1. The books I like to read the most feel like they’ve been written by somebody who had to write them or go crazy. They had to get them out of their heads. I like that kind of urgency.
2. No one wants to read an apologetic book.
3. You do not write your life with words…You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do. (A Monster Calls)
4. How you leave the reader is so important – not the climax; I call it the ‘exit feeling’.
5. In some ways. I always feel between worlds, between cultures, and I think that’s not necessarily a bad place for a writer to be. Writers are kind of on the fringe anyway, observing, writing things down. I’m still mostly American, but it’s a nice tension.
6. Don’t think you haven’t lived long enough to have a story to tell. (A Monster Calls)
7. For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do – usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.
8. If you set out to write an adjective novel, you’re setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.
9. The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking. (The Knife of Never Letting Go)

Read: Patrick Ness’s 5 Main Tips For Aspiring Writers

Patrick Ness is an American-born British author. He has written for England’s Radio 4 and Sunday Telegraph and is a literary critic for The Guardian. He is well known for his YA books, including the Chaos Walking trilogy and A Monster Calls. Ness won the annual Carnegie Medal from the British librarians both in 2011 and in 2012, for Monsters of Men and A Monster Calls. He wrote the screenplay of the 2016 film adaptation of A Monster Calls, and was the creator and writer of the Doctor Who spin-off series Class. His novels for adults are The Crash of Hennington, The Crane Wife, and Meridian. His latest book is the young adult dystopian, Piper at the Gates of Dusk. Ness has taught creative writing at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, and was the first Writer in Residence for BookTrust. Follow him on Instagram @patricknessbooks.

Source for image: Author’s agents, Credit: Helen Giles

by Amanda Patterson
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