Literary Birthday – 26 June – Edith Pearlman

10 Quotes

1. It’s very important for a writer to be unnoticed, as quiet and unnoticed as possible.
2. I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference.
3. There’s no rule I want to break or ever wanted to break – I find the conventional life gratifying – as long as I can sit at my typewriter, alone, for half a day.
4. What a rich phrase. You could live a life on the income it yielded.
5. I always loved to read, and I wanted to be part of the project of literature. My physical longevity is due to luck, and my literary longevity is due to my physical longevity.
6. All the stories I write come from someone I’ve met or some anecdote I’ve heard.
7. I am slow. A sentence often takes an hour to compose before I throw it out. What can you do?
8. Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics–reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world.
9. The natural world is often bleak, but the language devoted to it is as careful as needlepoint and prophetic as well.
10. I wanted to publish a book simply to be buried with it; that’s all I wanted. I had no ambition beyond that.

Edith Pearlman is an American short story writer. She is is the recipient of the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of short fiction. Her most recent collection, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Source for image https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Edith_Pearlman_2011_NBCC_Awards_2012_Shankbone.JPG Credit David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons