Literary Birthday – 7 January – William Peter Blatty

William Peter Blatty was born 7 January 1928 and died 12 January 2017.

Seven Quotes

  1. I have never read horror, nor do I consider The Exorcist to be such, but rather as a suspenseful supernatural detective story, or paranormal police procedural.
  2. Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.
  3. I tried to make every bit of it as creepy as I could. And I had the same response you do. I feel the same way. The hospital scenes, that procedure was so real.
  4. God never talks. But the devil keeps advertising.
  5. But a myth, to speak plainly, to me is like a menu in a fancy French restaurant: glamorous, complicated camouflage for a fact you wouldn’t otherwise swallow, like maybe lima beans.
  6. Procrastination is what we often call resistance.
  7. We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to whither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops—which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.

William Peter Blatty was an American writer and filmmaker. The Exorcist is his most well-known novel. He also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation, for which he won an Academy Award.

Source for photograph: jtblatty, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 7th January 2017
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