Literary Birthday – 25 February – John Lanchester

Happy Birthday, John Lanchester, born 25 February 1962.

John Lanchester Quotes

1. The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.
2. We wouldn’t care so much what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did.
3. Sometimes, the only way of doing something is to do it.
4. I write non-fiction quicker and I write it on a computer. Fiction I write longhand and that helps make it clear that it comes from a slightly different part of the brain, I think. The other distinction is that with non-fiction I’m constantly editing as I go along and with fiction I don’t. If you engage the critical part of you it makes it much harder and actually you just need to get through a first draft. (via)
5. I don’t answer the phone or do my email; I don’t do anything until I’ve got the day’s writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction and journalism is 1,500. That’s a level I can sustain. (via)

John Lanchester is a British journalist and novelist. The Debt to Pleasure won the 1996 Whitbread Book Award in the First Novel category and the 1997 Hawthornden Prize. His most recent books are Capital, Reality and Other Stories, the Dystopian novel, The Wall (longlisted for The Booker Prize), and the non-fiction book, How to Speak Money. Capital was adapted into a three-part TV series for BBC 1 and it won an International Emmy Award. Lanchester was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002.

by Amanda Patterson

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