Literary Birthday – 7 June – Harry Crews

Harry Crews was born 7 June 1935 and died 28 March 2012.

Seven Quotes

There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.
If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read – if you wait for the time, you will never do it.
Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about.
It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit—to look at them and make something of them.
What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living.
The writer’s job is to get naked, To hide nothing. To look away from nothing. To look at it. To not blink. To be not embarrassed or shamed of it. Strip it down and lets get down to where the blood is, the bone is.
The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked, the right way and the way that was not so right.

Harry Crews was an American novelist, playwright, short story writer and essayist. Crews published continuously since his first novel, The Gospel Singer, on average of one novel per year, until he died.