Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
Zoë Heller

Literary Birthday – 7 July – Zoë Heller

Happy Birthday, Zoë Heller, born on 7 July 1965.

Zoë Heller Quotes

  1. I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.
  2. It’s very bad for the soul, all this banging on about yourself, and it induces simultaneously a sort of grotesque narcissism and paranoia and self-loathing. I’ve found that it gives you a tiny glimpse into the world of proper celebrities and why they are so nuts.
  3. You kind of have to begin with a very grand hope for what you’re going to do, and inevitably what you bring out is a sort of burnt offering by comparison. To maintain this metaphor, the thing I remember feeling towards the end of writing this book was this feeling that I didn’t care if it was an excellent cake or excellent batch of cookies; I just wanted people to read it and tell me that it was recognisably in the cake or cookie family.
  4. My hope, at least, is that I write difficult, complicated, but sympathetic characters.
  5. I’m slightly irritated by what I think is a kind of modern demand for characters you can root for, characters you would like to be friends with. Speaking as a reader, I have to say that some of my favourite characters in literature are some of the nasty ones.
  6. One of the things I sometimes feel is that if you’re a writer and you’re going to write criticism, there comes a point when you have to make a choice between continuing to write reviews and whether you want to go out in the evenings and continue to have a social life.
  7. It took me a while to establish the discipline of writing without a deadline. The wonderful thing about journalism is kind of being given your homework and having a deadline and knowing you have to do it.

Zoë Heller is an English journalist and novelist. She was educated at Oxford University and Columbia University in New York. She has published three novels, Everything You Know, Notes on a Scandal, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and made into a film in 2006, and The Believers.

Source for image: User:Leprof_7272, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zo%C3%AB_Heller_English_write_D_Shankbone_adapted.tif


by Amanda Patterson
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Posted on: 7th July 2014
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