Literary Birthday – 17 July – Chris Crutcher

Happy Birthday, Chris Crutcher, born 17 July 1946.

Chris Crutcher Quotes

1. If you think your life sucks, it probably does. Do something about it.
2. I don’t think I’ll ever lose the feeling that I had when I read To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee was going back into her childhood. I grew up in a real small town – Lee’s was in the South, mine the Northwest – but small towns have a lot in common. There was such a revelation in knowing that a story could be told like that.
3. But the truth doesn’t need to be known, or believed, to be true.
4. I am for anything that makes teens visible in an honest way… in other words, anything that represents them the way they are, positively or negatively.
5. You have to be careful not to use anything too colloquial or you date the book.
6. Being an outsider means not being heard, not having a voice. It means being treated as a second-class citizen, being diminished in the eyes of others. We have all felt this way at one time or another, but some feel it more consistently.
7. You put yourself out there in the truest way you can and hope others do the same. You’ll connect or you won’t, but you did what you could.
8. Racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.
9. Comedy is tragedy standing on its head with its pants down.

Chris Crutcher is an American novelist and a family therapist. His books include Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, Deadline, and King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography. He received the Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 2000 for his lifetime contribution in writing for teens.

Source for image: Kelly Milner Halls, Copyrighted free use, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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