Literary Birthday – 19 February – Jeff Kinney

Happy Birthday, Jeff Kinney, born 19 February 1971.

Five Kinney Quotes

1. I think the best stories are told in book form.
2. The hardest thing about being a writer is being discriminating about what you put down on paper. It’s very easy to just write everything that comes into your head, and voila! You have a book. But you might not have a very good book.
3. I’m not really sure what makes a book a ‘classic’ to begin with, but I think it has to be at least fifty years old and some person or animal has to die at the end.
4. I think Goodreads is the best place to look for books
5. I had to force myself to exercise discretion when I wrote Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I realised I was writing too quickly, and a lot of material I was writing wasn’t very funny. So I decided that before I started writing the actual book, I was going to come up with 77 ‘idea pages’, and that I’d only include the best ideas in the book. It ended up taking me four years to fill up my 77 idea pages, but it was worth it.

Jeff Kinney is an American game designer, cartoonist, producer, and author of children’s books including the Diary Of A Wimpy Kid book series. He is the creator of the Poptropica website.

by Amanda Patterson

Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar