Literary Birthday – 7 August – Anne Fadiman

Happy Birthday, Anne Fadiman, born on 7 August 1953.

Anne Fadiman Quotes

1. If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.
2. I have never been able to resist a book about books.
3. I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.
4. For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
5. The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you’re comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured.
6. Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
7. Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.
8. Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
9. If you can’t see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else’s culture?
10. Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument.

Anne Fadiman is an American author, editor, and teacher. She is known for The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. She is the author, most recently, of the essay collection Frog. She has also written a memoir about her father titled The Wine Lover’s Daughter. She is Professor in the Practice of English and Francis Writer in Residence at Yale.

Source for Image: Photo by Gabriel Amadeus Cooney

by Amanda Patterson
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