Literary Birthday – 28 August – Janet Frame

Janet Frame was born 28 August 1924, and died 29 January 2004.

Seven Quotes

1. I like to see life with its teeth out.
2. Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
3. All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.
4. Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listening, for putting a wise keyhole to the ear of my mind.
5. There is no past, present, or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.
6. A writer must stand on the rock of her self and her judgment or be swept away by the tide or sink in the quaking earth: there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer’s own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.
7. I really love emailing, it’s like writing a poem in the sky.

Janet Frame was a New Zealand author. She wrote 11 novels, four collections of short stories, a book of poetry, and three autobiographical volumes. Frame’s traumatic experiences as a young woman feature in Jane Campion’s popular film adaptation of An Angel at My Table.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Janet_Frame_1993_(cropped).jpg

Unknown photographer, CC BY 3.0 NZ <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/nz/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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