Peter Høeg

Literary Birthday – 17 May – Peter Høeg

Happy Birthday, Peter Høeg, born 17 May 1957.

Peter Høeg Quotes

  1. I start every day with meditation and then I write and then I meditate again and then I do the second writing stretch.
  2. A novel is like a wave of tension that travels over a very long time … I think it is important not to carry with you the tension that you created in one work into the next.
  3. Each new book, it’s a game for me. It’s like going to a carnival and dressing up.
  4. It’s a mistake that we divide art into popular art and fine, highbrow, high-quality art.  It has no basis in reality. And it is a way to keep other people and other people’s taste at a distance. It is a way of closing oneself towards some kinds of reality.
  5. I like to play with genres and to experience the thriller and the love story and to play with reality.
  6. There is a day of change in the life of most authors… That is the day they go from writing poems and short stories to working on a novel and writing for several hours every day… I must have been about twenty-four or twenty-five when I reached that turning point. I’d written for years before that but had never sent anything to a publisher.
  7. My first novel took four years to write, but that doesn’t say anything about the quality or the size of the novel. It was a learning piece, an apprentice book, because writing is not just a talent but a skill. It’s something you have to learn and develop. It’s a slow process.
  8. The book is the slowest art/media form. Everything else is very fast, but a book is very slow.
  9. To describe what you’ve read is like explaining music in writing.
  10. There are no fearless people, only fearless moments.

Peter Høeg is a Danish fiction writer. He published his first novel, A History of Danish Dreams, in 1988 but it was Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, published in 1992, that earned him international literary celebrity. His books have been published in more than 30 countries.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_H%C3%B8eg.jpg

Soppakanuuna, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 17th May 2013
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