Literary Birthday – 11 April – Thomas Harris

Happy Birthday, Thomas Harris, born on 11 April 1940.

Thomas Harris Quotes

1. Fear comes with imagination. It’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.
2. You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It’s all there and you just have to find it.
3. Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness, except greed.
4. I think it’s easy to mistake understanding for empathy – we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It’s hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.
5. How seldom we recognise the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.
6. The intimacy of the detail – why The Silence of the Lambs is quite possibly the Thriller Writer’s bible.
7. Sometimes you really have to shove and grunt and sweat. Some days you go to your office and you’re the only one who shows up, none of the characters show up, and you sit there by yourself, feeling like an idiot. And some days everybody shows up ready to work. You have to show up at your office every day. If an idea comes by, you want to be there to get it in.
8. Writing novels is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
9. What do you look at while you’re making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do no raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.
10. Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn’t it?

Read: Why The Silence Of The Lambs Is The Thriller Writer’s Bible

Thomas Harris is an American author and screenwriter. Harris began his writing career covering crime in the United States and Mexico, and was a reporter and editor at the Associated Press in New York. He has penned five suspense novels and is best known for creating the character, Hannibal Lecter. All of his works have been made into films, the most notable being the multi-Oscar winning The Silence of the Lambs. In 2019, he wrote Cari Mora, his first novel in 13 years. His novels have sold more than 50 million copies. In 2007, Harris was presented with a Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Source for image: Penguin Random House

by Amanda Patterson

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