Literary Birthday – 9 November – Tahereh Mafi

Happy Birthday, Tahereh Mafi, born 9 November 1988.

Tahereh Mafi Quotes

1. Read a lot. Write a lot. Do that over and over again for the rest of your life.
2. I really believe that the only differences between a successful and an unsuccessful person are time and perseverance. There are many extremely talented individuals who might never be appreciated, simply because they gave up too soon. Every single day is a struggle, but we have to fight the hardest on the days we most want to give in.
3. I definitely knew that I wanted to write about a girl coming into her own. I like to think that the story is about a girl trying to find herself, and the world telling her who to be.
4. I wrote in a vacuum. I wrote in complete isolation from the world of publishing, not knowing and not actively trying to find out how it worked. I was just writing novels and getting rejected. I wrote five manuscripts before I wrote Shatter Me. I tried to get each one of them published. There were hundreds of rejections and constantly studying and learning about the industry.
5. The role of an author has changed so drastically. You’re no longer writing in the safety of your own mind.
6. My biggest weakness also happens to be the one thing I think comes most naturally to me: character-building. I love people, and I love character-driven stories, and I prefer spending time developing these paper people than anything else. Building the world bores me to death. I always have to remind myself that the setting is important.
7. I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
8. People seldom realise that they tell lies with their lips and truths with their eyes all the time.
9. Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures. No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence.

Tahereh Mafi is an American author who is best known for the Shatter Me series and Furthermore. Follow @TaherehMafi on Twitter and visit her website

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tahereh_Mafi_(21994).jpg

Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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