Literary Birthday – 22 April – Marie Phillips

Happy Birthday, Marie Phillips, born 22 April 1976.

Marie Phillips Quotes

1. I want the good books to be the ones that get read, no matter who wrote or published them.
2. I use the Pomodoro Method of timekeeping. You use an alarm to make yourself work in focused 25-minute stretches, with five-minute breaks in between, and take a longer break every two hours. It’s an amazing productivity tool, I’d recommend it to everyone regardless of their line of work, though make sure you have an alarm that vibrates if you don’t want to be thrown out of the library!
3. You can’t ignore the evidence that literary fiction remains the preserve of white men. There have been so many statistical analyses of review sections of newspapers, or who gets nominated for prizes.
4. When I was studying documentary filmmaking, my teacher always used to say that if the film isn’t working, it’s often the scene that you’re most attached to that’s standing in your way. The same is true of books. You can love parts of your writing beyond reason and they hold up everything else. In the end you have to ask yourself: yes I like it, but do I need it?
5. I’m a pantser who would like to be a plotter!

Marie Phillips is a British writer. She is best known for her novel, Gods Behaving Badly, a comic fantasy concerning ancient Greek gods living in modern-day Hampstead. Her second novel, The Table of Less Valued Knights is a comic take on the world of King Arthur. It was published in the UK in 2014 and nominated for the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her third novel, a Shakespearean comedy entitled Oh, I Do Like To Be… will be released in 2018.

Source for image: author’s website Photograph by Maria Cavali

Source for quotes /Source for quotes

by Amanda Patterson

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