Literary Birthday – 16 June – Erich Segal

Erich Segal was born 16 June 1937, and died 17 January 2010.

Six Quotes

1. I wrote Yellow Submarine for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for The Games, about the Olympic Games. I wrote Love Story, both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote RPM for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!
2. Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living – or that either can be fatal?
3. Actually, I have always felt [Love Story] to be a book about a young couple, but even more about a father and son. When I wrote it America was in the midst of a total generation war (Vietnam, Woodstock, Haight Ashbury etc.). The relationship between Jenny and Phil contrasted sharply with that of Oliver and his father, and I think that the universal appeal may have lain in the reconciliation of the generations at the end of the book.
4. The ‘equilibrium’ that people see in me is really an illusion. I am as flawed as anyone. It’s only that I seem to have the knack of hiding.
5. The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act. But maybe they never heard what Dr London told me once, Freud said that for the little things in life we should react according to our reason. But for really big decisions, we should heed what our unconscious tells us.
6. I urge you to engrave this on the template of your memories: there are thousands of diseases in this world, but Medical Science only has an empirical cure for twenty-six of them. The rest is … guesswork.

Erich Segal was an American author and screenwriter. He was best known for writing the Love Story.

by Amanda Patterson

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