Literary Birthday – 7 February – Patrick McGrath
Happy Birthday, Patrick McGrath, born 7 February 1950.
Patrick McGrath Quotes
- I am not, as you will have observed, a man greatly enamoured of his fellow human beings. I do not enter lightly into the foibles and whimsicalities of others, I do not suffer fools gladly, I seem able, in conversation, only to needle or be needled.
- I think exile will certainly work for a writer, by allowing him the distance, the detachment, to work without being distracted by the uproar of the present.
- It has seemed to me that for a long time the writer and the psychiatrist have been up to very similar things in terms of the exploration of human dysfunction. The writer wants to create forms of entertainment and to give pleasure, the psychiatrist is engaged in a therapeutic task. But we are both essentially engaged in the exploration of human nature.
- Houses, I have come to believe, like love, like nature herself, should not reassure, should not attempt to soothe, or give comfort, but should, rather, excite.
- None of us is a reliable narrator really. Borges has written about this: you tell a story and after the fourth time you tell it you don’t know if you’re remembering the thing that happened or you’re remembering the last time you told the story.
Patrick McGrath is a British novelist whose work has been categorised as Gothic fiction. He is the author of three collections of short fiction, including Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, and t10 novels, including Asylum
and Spider. ‘His fiction is principally characterised by the first person unreliable narrator, and recurring subject matter in his work includes mental illness, repressed homosexuality, and adulterous relationships.’ (source) Three of McGrath’s novels and one of his stories have been adapted into films. His latest novel is Last Days in Cleaver Square. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002.
Source for image: Seekbeauty, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patrick_McGrath_in_Denver.png
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