Literary Birthday – 27 April – Patricia Lockwood

Happy Birthday, Patricia Lockwood, born on 27 April 1982.

Patricia Lockwood Quotes

1. The real influences go back the whole way. They lurk in your guts and direct the whole system. You don’t always know who they are. (The Booker Prize)
2. The internet – in the form of social media, at least – is much more like fiction than it is anything else. You’d think it would be like a diary, but it isn’t. There are protagonists, there are villains, there are sudden shifts in point of view. There are plot twists that real life would reject. The day is its unit, rather than the chapter, but it is in fact a novel itself. (The Booker Prize)
3. You have to look for where the language goes crunchy, where everybody starts saying the same things and formulating their reactions in the same way – and step out of it. (Women’s Prize)
4. The modern job of a writer, at least one that enables you to make a living, requires you to do a lot of things on the side, so I was travelling and I was on planes a lot. I had a .doc file on my phone and I could write something, one of these little vignettes, in one of these small spaces of time that were available to me… So, yeah, a large part of my process was finding these tiny chunks of time and filling them with these tiny chunks of something else. (Centre For Fiction)
5. Always look for the triples in my sentences. You’ll see them in my essays, you’ll see them in my poetry, you’ll see them in this. Anytime I want to hit someone over the head I’ll do triples. Three clauses in the sentence and, bam, I feel like a god. (Centre For Fiction)
6. If I plotted it out it would be like 10 hours a day—not great. But I have started, because I had some memory issues after I got ill, I got this HUGE moleskin notebook that is serious business. (Hazlit)
7. I always start out with a book in the morning and a notebook and I just sort of write down what I’m thinking and then at some point you just you just lift off, and then you go. (Hazlit)

Patricia Lockwood is an award-winning American poet, literary novelist, and essayist. She is the author of the novel No One is Talking About This, a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and which won the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2021; the memoir Priestdaddy, which was named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and was named one of the Guardian‘s 100 best books of the 21st century; and the poetry collections Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She was named a judge for the 2026 Booker Prize. Her most recent novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, was published in 2025.

Source for image: Student member of Kelly Writers House, edited in Photoshop by User:Blz 2049, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patricia_Lockwood_2013_cropped_edit.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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