Good, or bad, they're sacred | LitBash 43

Books from writers who were...

Born this week:

Claude Simon, France
"To begin with, our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete. Then our memory is selective. Finally, writing transforms."

Harold Pinter, UK
"There can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

Gertrud von Le Fort, Germany

Francois Mauriac, France
"Most men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed off wings where he never ventures."

Takiji Kobayashi, Japan

Mikhail Lermontov, Russia
"Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning."

Alfred Neumann, Germany

Bernard von Brentano, Germany

Manuel de Fonseca, Portugal

Italo Calvino, Italy
"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."

Oscar Wilde, UK
"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."

Dino Buzzati Traverso, Italy

Jose Saramago, Portugal
"Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed."

Gunter Grass, Germany
"Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred."

Died this week:

Alexy K. Tolstoy, Russia

Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Denmark

Anatole France, France
"Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue."

Ernst Didring, Sweden

Hjalmar Soderberg, Sweden

Marcel Ayme, France

Louis Guilloux, France

Danilo Kis, Serbia
"Do not get involved with anyone, a writer is alone."