Literary Birthday – 13 November – George V. Higgins

George V. Higgins was born 13 November 1939, and died 6 November 1999.

George V. Higgins Quotes

1. This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.
2. Egotism is the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.
3. The disability of much American literature, is that it’s written by college professors sitting on their big fat rusty-dusties who don’t know anything about law, politics or any subject in which real people make real livings.
4. The quotes make the story. Dialogue is character and character is plot.
5. Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgement, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance.
6. Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist.
7. If you do not seek to publish what you have written, then you are not a writer and you never will be.

George V. Higgins was an American author, lawyer, newspaper columnist, and college professor. Higgins worked as a deputy assistant attorney general for the Commonwealth, and an Assistant United States Attorney and a journalist and newspaper columnist before becoming a novelist. He wrote more than 30 books, but is well known for his bestselling hardboiled crime novels. Popular titles include The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Cogan’s Trade. In 1990, Higgins published On Writing, a book of hard-bitten advice for aspiring writers.
‘Higgins was proud of his skill in rendering dialogue with great accuracy. He liked to point out that accurate dialogue is not a verbatim transcription of things said but an imaginative recreation in compressed form. He was also an expert in lending atmosphere to a series of harsh or barren facts, inducing his readers to figure out important things artfully implied in the text but never stated.’  (via)

Source for Image: George V. Higgins, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_V._Higgins_(1975).png

by Amanda Patterson

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