Literary Birthday – 9 July – Glen Cook
Happy Birthday, Glen Cook, born 9 July 1944.
Glen Cook Quotes
- Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.
- Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.
- Where there is no waste, there is no want.
- Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.
- The main advice I’ve given every beginning writer I’ve ever talked to is, ‘Do it’. You’ve got to stop talking about it and sit down and do it. Put your ass in front of a computer and do it.
- Consistency is the sign of a narrow mind.
- The only characters I’ve made to resemble real people have been grotesques.
- Books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.
- Write. Don’t talk about writing. Don’t tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don’t give me a bunch of ‘somedays’. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English.
Glen Cook is a contemporary American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is widely considered to be the ‘father’ of Grimdark fantasy, due to his influential The Black Company series. He included morally ambiguous, hard-bitten characters, and complex, bleak Dystopian worlds where magic is dangerous, power corrupts, and conflicts are deadly. He is said to have paved the way for writers like Joe Abercrombie and Mark Lawrence. In 2025, Cook returns to this Grimdark fantasy series with Lies Weeping. He is also well known for the Garrett P.I. fantasy series, starting with Sweet Silver Blues.
Source for image: Harmonia Amanda, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Utos109-Glen_Cook.jpg
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