Literary Birthday – 8 May – Roddy Doyle

Happy Birthday, Roddy Doyle, born 8 May 1958.

Quotes

1. No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn’t yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.
2. The best way to reveal a character is to get them to open their mouth.
3. Some of the people who look the most normal are probably the maddest people trying to look normal.
4. Most working days I can be at my desk for nine hours a day.
5. If you are a writer you’re at home, which means you’re out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.
6. Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.
7. I see people in terms of dialogue and I believe that people are their talk.
8. I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn’t a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

Read: Roddy Doyle’s 10 Rules For Writers

Roddy Doyle is an Irish novelist, dramatist, and screenwriter. Several of his books have been made into films, including The Commitments  in 1991. Doyle was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke ha ha ha.

Source for image:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doyleroddy33.jpg

Jon Kay, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar

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