Literary Birthday – 7 April – Gerald Brenan

Gerald Brenan was born 7 April 1894 and died 19 January 1987.

Nine Quotes

1. It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
2. Poets and painters are outside the class system, or rather they constitute a special class of their own, like the circus people and the Gypsies.
3. Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.
4. Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.
5. When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.
6. Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.
7. Every writer and artist wonders what in the world people of other professions can find to live for.
8. One road to happiness is to cultivate curiosity about everything.
9. A bad memory is the mother of invention.

Gerald Brenan was a British writer and Hispanist who spent much of his life in Spain. He is best known for The Spanish Labyrinth, a historical work on the background to the Spanish Civil War, and for South from Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village.

 by Amanda Patterson

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