Literary Birthday – 18 December – A.M. Homes

Happy Birthday, A. M. Homes, born 18 December 1961.

Nine Quotes

1. I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There’s an accuracy to fiction that people don’t really talk about – an emotional accuracy.
2. I was just tortured by anxiety and misery. The only time I was happy was when I wrote things, painted things, made things, or played the drums and guitar.
3. I write in order to make people think about their lives and the larger world, and I very much wanted to do it in a way that offered hope.
4. If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.
5. I think you can write about what you know for about an hour and a half. Then you have to start bullshitting. So I say, lie to me and lie to me well. The only way to write well is to write accurately. Accuracy is not about the reader, it’s about the subject and the character.
6. People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.
7. You are your own beginning. Every day, every hour, every minute, you start again. There is no point wishing you were someone else, you are who you are—start there.
8. Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.
9. I once jokingly told someone that every book is like a relationship. They’re four or five years long. They’re serious. They demand a lot of attention. But I remember thinking that I wanted to have one with someone who’s not so crazy and peculiar and demanding.

A. M. Homes is an American writer. She is best known for her controversial writing, most notably The End Of Alice, a novel about a convicted child molester and murderer. In June 2013, she won the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize for Fiction) for her novel May We Be Forgiven.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_M_Homes_by_David_Shankbone.jpg

David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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