Literary Birthday – 20 February – Sally Rooney

Happy Birthday, Sally Rooney, born 20 February 1991.

Sally Rooney Quotes

1. A large part of my style has definitely developed through writing emails.
2. It’s so difficult to be conscious of a development of a style. You find yourself writing in a certain style and the analysis of how you came to it can only ever be applied retroactively. You’re never conscious of why you’re producing it. It probably did come from the kind of books I was attracted to reading.
3. Dialogue is the most fun to write. It’s kind of like a tennis match.
4. When I’m writing something, everything falls into place. When I’m not writing, stuff keeps happening to me, and there’s nowhere to put it all.
5. The philosophy of individualism owes a great deal to the tradition of novel-writing and novel-reading. In its development and in its aesthetics, the novel is not politically neutral; it has been a participant in history all along.
6. I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy and the way we construct one another.
7. I try to keep my sentences quite pared back. What I really want to do is observe people’s relationships and interactions. I don’t want language to get in the way of that. It’s quite a difficult process to achieve that, for the language to feel clear.

Sally Rooney is an Irish author of primarily literary fiction. She has often been dubbed “the first great millennial novelist”. Her debut novel Conversations with Friends was published in 2017 and her second novel Normal People followed a year later. Her latest novels are Beautiful World, Where Are You and Intermezzo. She adapted Normal People  into a popular television miniseries in 2020. Her bestselling novels have sold more than 6 million copies worldwide.

Source for image: Faber
Source for quotes / source 2 for quotes

by Amanda Patterson

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