Literary Birthday – 5 May – Kaye Gibbons

Happy Birthday, Kaye Gibbons, born on 5 May 1960.

Kaye Gibbons Quotes

1. Writers and readers agree to meet in a novel, an appropriate place for a proper summit during a finite and particular interlude in your life and mine. I’m always ready to leave when the time comes, when all the words I meant to say are said, but a clean and thorough getaway is impossible because readers are generally an optimistic lot, except for students who sometimes feel roped and dragged to the affair and require a kind of tender convincing to remain.
2. Having raised three daughters and written books about women and the extraordinary layers of their lives, womanhood has been on my mind, personally and professionally, for as long as I’ve been doing both literature and laundry.
3. Writing is in many ways an existential form of revenge and correction, a way of reconciling wounds.
4. Writing serious work one wants to be read and to last isn’t like a hobby that can be picked up and put down, it’s a lovely obsession and a very demanding joy.
5. My writing is powered by Diet Coke, very cold and in a can. If Diet Coke was taken off the market, I’m afraid I’d never write again!
6. Learn to be self-critical, which is not always pleasant and not a gift someone’s born with, but it comes from reading excellent literature, obliterating clichés, and being willing to understand that editing your own work is just as important as the original writing. By the time I show my editor a page, I’ve gone over it a hundred times, or more.
7. Getting involved with things that don’t matter in life will get in the way of it, as they will with anything, like family and home, that do matter.

Kaye Gibbons is an American novelist of women’s fiction. Two of her books, Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman, were selected for Oprah’s Book Club. In 1989 Gibbons received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to write a third novel, A Cure for Dreams. The sequel to Ellen Foster, The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster, was published in 2005. Gibbons is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers .

Source for Image of author: The Joy Harris Literary Agency

by Amanda Patterson

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