Happy Birthday, Susan Cheever, born 31 July 1943.
Six Quotes
- Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time.
- What makes someone want to be a writer? Clearly, one thing this dream requires is a ferocious hunger, a hunger for recognition, a yearning to be heard that roars through the soul with a sound so great that the stories often feel as if they are discovered rather than invented.
- Bad writing is often driven by resentment, and good writing is based on authority.
- Obsession is so extreme and so hard to imagine with the rational mind that it has a science-fiction-like quality to it—it’s almost as if the obsessed one has been taken over by a replica, a pod, a facsimile of the rational person. When one is in the grip of an obsession, everything else—children, regular meals, sleep, work—is swept away.
- I believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it’s an amazing form that we haven’t even begun to tap…we’re just getting started figuring out what the rules are.
- Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst.
Susan Cheever is an American author. She is best known for Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, John Cheever, and American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work.
Source for Image
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