Literary Birthday – 5 June – Margaret Drabble

Happy Birthday, Margaret Drabble, born on 5 June 1939.

Margaret Drabble Quotes

1. You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.
2. The choice of name tends to affect the development of the character, even the plot. This may be so in real life also.
3. When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
4. I need words and print… I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.
5. There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.
6. I very much wanted to be an actress and in fact I did act for a year, but by then I had my first novel accepted.
7. My first novel I just wrote, day after day, like a very long letter, with no conscious sense of form or plot at all. In the second, I had a little more sense of shape. In the third, yet more. In the fourth, I tried to write (not very successfully) in the third person; in the fifth, I queried this method of narration and by The Needle’s Eye, I found I could do what I’d always wanted, which was to write a third-person novel with the point of view spread among various characters.

Margaret Drabble is an award-winning English novelist, biographer, and critic. She has published 19 books, including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, and The Witch of Exmoor. She writes in the tradition of such authors as George Eliot, Henry James, and Arnold Bennett. Drabble was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in Elizabeth II’s 1980 Birthday Honours, and was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours.

Source for Image: summonedbyfells, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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