Literary Birthday – 2 June – David Bezmozgis

Happy Birthday, David Bezmozgis, born 2 June 1973.

Eight Quotes

When you write a book, you want to have fidelity to the character. Characters and their emotions guide the structure of the novel.
Writing a novel, in an unplanned and unpredictable way, makes you engaged; it takes you into yourself, and it becomes something between you and the character for a moment, and then you move back into the structure of the book. I love those moments, because they are completely unbidden.
There are different types of readers. People draw lines at which three things intersect: the character, the author, and the reader.
I think every book is a reaction to everything you’re written before, and most immediately to the book you wrote just before.
Most people will reach a point where, whatever their ideology, they will relent, or conform, and that keeps them kind of in the general mass of people. And for those who find that they can’t, all of sudden they leave the general mass, they find that they become exceptions, and exceptional, and often this makes them public.
Sooner or later, the realisation arrives: the child discovers the immaturity of the parent, and the parent the maturity of his child.
If you think there’s no choice, look harder. There is always a choice. A third way, if not a fourth. Whether we have the strength to make those choices is another matter. Of which I am no less guilty than anyone else.
Language is a personality as well. People are different when they speak different languages.

David Bezmozgis is a Canadian writer and filmmaker. He is the author of Natasha and Other Stories, The Free World, and The Betrayers. He was chosen by The New Yorker as one of the best 20 writers under 40 in 2010.

Source for image: Dan Harasymchuk, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons