Happy Birthday, Michèle Roberts, born 20 May 1949.
Seven Quotes
- My theory is that inspiration is born of loss. So that if there’s an empty space inside you, something can come and fill it. Something can get born inside you.
- I wrote to invent a culture, a world, I could belong in. Catholicism was a misogynistic religion and I needed to write my way out of it.
- I become haunted by it. I dream about it. A novel erupts from a visual image, often a dream image, often an image of a dead body.
- Everything begins as ink scribble in the notebook I carry. At some point these handwritten notes for a story or novel transfer onto the computer. Up until then you can pretend you’re not doing it, so that the process is unselfconscious and unanxious. Once I’ve properly begun, I enjoy the process of editing on screen. I print out at night what I’ve written during the day, because I like reading hard copy and can scribble corrections on it more easily.
- Poetry, however, I write in longhand on big sheets of paper. I write these out over and over, twenty versions perhaps, the poem growing a bit more each time, until it’s done.
- I redraft a great deal. That’s what writing means: rewriting.
- Love goes on. The love of friends. Friendship is my oxygen. I’ve said that often and it’s true. Writing goes on too: I keep on building my paper house; my chrysalis
Michèle Roberts is a British writer, novelist and poet. She is the author of 15 highly acclaimed novels, including Ignorance, which was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and Daughters of the house
, which won the W.H. Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and the short story collection, Mud: Stories of Sex and Love
.
Source for photograph
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