“The greatest stories appeal to our deepest selves. And the
deepest form of language is storytelling," says Matt Haig.
I don't know Matt Haig. I only know that a friend of mine on Facebook shared this today and I fell in love. I have a habit of printing quotes and sticking them on my wall like Duran Duran posters ripped from Teen Bop in the 80's. Magazines I had to hide under my bed because I was neither a teenager nor allowed to look at that filth. :) My walls are filled with only quotes, and rejection letters, and nice notes from strangers and friends now, and all of them inspire me.
1. People should never be made to feel bad about what they are reading. People who feel bad about reading will stop reading.
2. Snobbery leads to worse books. Pretentious writing and pretentious reading. Books as exclusive members clubs. Narrow genres. No inter-breeding. All that fascist nonsense that leads commercial writers to think it is okay to be lazy with words and for literary writers to think it is okay to be lazy with story.
3. If something is popular it can still be good. Just ask Shakespeare. Or the Beatles. Or peanut butter.
4. Get over the genre thing. The art world accepted that an artist could take from anywhere he or she wanted a long time ago. Roy Lichtenstein could turn comic strips into masterpieces back in 1961. Intelligence is not a question of subject but approach.
5. It is harder to be funny than to be serious. For instance, this is a serious sentence: 'After dinner, Alistair roamed the formal garden behind this unfamiliar house, wishing he had never betrayed Lorelei's trust.' That took me eight seconds to write. And yet I've been trying to write a funny sentence for three hours now, and I'm getting hungry.
6. Many of the greatest writers have been children's writers.
7. It is easy to say something to people who are exactly like you. A bigger challenge lies in locating that universal piece of all of us that wants to be wowed, and brought together by a great story. There isn't a human in the world who wouldn't enter the Sistine Chapel and not want to look up. Does that make Michelangelo a low-brow populist?
8. It does not matter about who the author is. The only thing a book should be judged on is the words inside.
9. Martin Amis once moaned on the radio that there were too many writers talking across the table to their readers rather than down to them. This was the point I went off Martin Amis.
10. You don't have to be serious about something to be serious about something.
11. You don't have to be realistic to be true.
