Literary Birthday – 15 February – Linda Grant

Happy Birthday, Linda Grant, born 15 February 1951.

Linda Grant Quotes

1. Reading wasn’t my religion – it was my oxygen.
2. You cannot have a taste for minimalist décor if you seriously read books.
3. I was the first person I knew to own a Kindle, as my parents were the first family they knew to own a TV. We are Modernists. We like the idea of the future.
4. His ambition was to grow up to be a book.
5. I was the girl whose face fell when she saw a wrapped present in the shape of a box, perhaps a jigsaw puzzle. Worst of all, that preparation for the future slave-house of motherhood, a doll. I only wanted book tokens or books themselves – but better a book token. The worst present is the book you don’t want to read.
6. If you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography.
7. How can life end in the middle of the story? Because life always does.
8. I don’t plan and don’t make many notes. Any ideas that are written down in a notebook are fragmentary, half a thought. If I knew what I was going to be writing I wouldn’t bother making the effort of actually doing it. I am driven by my own curiosity – who are these people, what happens next? (Guardian)
9. I don’t write for very long, three hours at most. Staying nailed to the chair for any longer out of some sense of clerical duty is pointless, as nothing good will come of it. (Guardian)
10. My rituals of writing are so calcified I could be an elderly colonel at his gentleman’s club: ironed newspaper, tea piping hot, shoes the correct colour for in town. Without the scaffolding of my habits, I’m superstitiously convinced I’d never write a word. I don’t – can’t – write after lunch, in a cafe or any other public place, including trains and planes, or when anyone else is in the house. It’s an act of severe, intense solitude, partly now destroyed by the internet, and its deceptive promise of the ease of looking things up as you go along. (Guardian)

Linda Grant is a British award-winning novelist and journalist. Her first novel, The Cast Iron Shore, won the David Higham First Novel Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian Book Prize. She is the author of the memoir, I Murdered My Library and The Clothes on Their Backs, which was shortlisted for The Booker Prize. Her latest novel, The Story of the Forest was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. She lives in London and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Source for photograph: Linda Grant’s Press Resources Credit Judah Passow

by Amanda Patterson

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