Literary Birthday – 21 April – Elaine May

Happy Birthday, Elaine May, born 21 April 1932.

Five Quotes

  1. The only thing experience teaches you is what you can’t do. When you start, you think you can do anything. And then you start to get a little tired.
  2. It’s nothing more than quickly creating a situation between two people and throwing up some kind of problem for one of them.
  3. You know how sometimes you lie in bed at night and think, ‘What if the law of gravity just wears out and lets go and I drift into space?’ Does that ever make you anxious?
  4. The only safe thing is to take a chance.
  5. What is important in life and art? You know, when I was very young, I thought it didn’t matter what happened to me when I died so long as my work was immortal. As I age, I think, Well, perhaps if I had to trade dying right now and being immortal was just living on, I would choose living on.

Elaine May is an American screenwriter, film director, actress, and comedian. She has been nominated twice for an Academy Award, for Heaven Can Wait  and  Primary Colors. She also wrote the screenplay for The Birdcage. She received the National Medal of Arts in 2012.

Source for photograph: The Morning Call newspaper, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elaine_May_-_publicity1.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar

Posted on: 21st April 2015
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