Literary Birthday – 2 September – Allen Drury

Allen Drury was born on 2 September and died on 2 September 1998.

Allen Drury Quotes

1. Be kind, be decent, be generous, be tolerant, compassionate, and understanding. Be fast to praise, slow to judge. Remember, we’re all human, and don’t cast the first stone.
2. The best thing to do now, is to do the very best you can.
3. Son, this is a Washington, D.C. kind of lie. It’s when the other person knows you’re lying, and also knows you know he knows.
4. You won’t accomplish anything sitting around wishing. You’ve got to do things.
5. People defend nothing more violently than the pretences they live by.
6. You will have to take the writer’s word for it, because it is true. There are people and events in this book as in any that are akin to people and events in reality, but they are not the people and events of reality. Such resemblances as they do bear are transmuted through the observations and perceptions and understandings of the author into something far beyond and basically far different from the originals in the cases where originals can be argued to exist.
7. Of course, that was the thing about Washington, really; you didn’t have to be born to anything, you could just buy your way in.

Allen Drury was an American novelist. He was a master of political fiction, a #1 New York Times bestseller, and a Pulitzer Prize winner. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960 for Advise and Consent. He published 20 novels and five works of non-fiction, many of them bestsellers.

Source for image: Author’s Website