Literary Birthday – 17 October – Patrick Ness

Happy Birthday, Patrick Ness, born 17 October 1971.

Patrick Ness Quotes

1. The books I like to read the most feel like they’ve been written by somebody who had to write them or go crazy. They had to get them out of their heads. I like that kind of urgency.
2. No one wants to read an apologetic book.
3. How you leave the reader is so important – not the climax; I call it the ‘exit feeling’.
4. In some ways. I always feel between worlds, between cultures, and I think that’s not necessarily a bad place for a writer to be. Writers are kind of on the fringe anyway, observing, writing things down. I’m still mostly American, but it’s a nice tension.
5. For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do – usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.
6. If you set out to write an adjective novel, you’re setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

Read: Patrick Ness’s 5 Main Tips For Fiction Writers

Patrick Ness is an American-born British author of nine books. He has written for England’s Radio 4 and Sunday Telegraph and is a literary critic for The Guardian. He is well known for his YA books, including the Chaos Walking trilogy and A Monster Calls. Ness won the annual Carnegie Medal from the British librarians both in 2011 and in 2012, for Monsters of Men and A Monster Calls. His novels for adults are The Crash of Hennington, The Crane Wife, and Meridian. Follow him on Instagram.

Source for image: Ruben Ortega, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patrick_Ness_en_los_Premios_Goya_2017.jpg
Source for quotes

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar