How To Be Happy According to 20 Authors

It’s pretty safe to say that writers are strange people, eh? Kannu, I may have shared this link with you before.

http://thoughtcatalog.com/tanza-loudenback/2013/10/date-a-girl-who-writes/

but there are quite a lot of articles out there about dating writers.

http://www.chess.com/groups/forumview/20-great-things-about-dating-a-writer

then again, as with everything in life, kids, there are downsides as well

http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/12/never-date-a-writer-youll-end-up-as-material.html

http://theinboundevangelist.com/2013/06/24/41-reasons-why-you-should-not-date-or-marry-a-writer/

so it was with trepidation that I read this and wondered if I should share this with you two. But what the heck, you should know this. Writers, of any kind, are strange people. Today for lunch we will end up with a houseful of writers, two who have recently published their books and will be reading from it. It will be fun and games to check it out.

Anyway, the interesting factoid about this list was the number of authors that I have no idea about. Kurt Vonnegut was an author I knew about but have just read a book by him which blew my mind. Crazy writer. But others are new. For example, Gillian Flynn…no idea, Dennis LeHane…who?

But you would expect that writers would know about what life is all about eh? I was speaking to a friend about romantic novels. They are happy books, and I love reading them. I know people look down at them, but that’s being snobbish. Why be snobbish about romantic novels? Whenever somebody says so, I smile inside and think, your opinion is no different to all those who sneered at Shakespeare or any of the countless authors like Jane Austen when their novels first came about. So if anybody is snobbish about a particular genre, you immediately can paint that person as not a true reader. A true reader doesn’t care about these generalisations, what matters is the joy of reading. But to go back to reading, these writers do understand life and would be expected to write in their books about how to be happy.

But I am an optimistic chap, and love being happy. Which is why I will never be able to write fiction (heheheh), and since I am happy, I have to be insane if I believe in Mark Twain who said that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.  So if you ask me which quotes resonate with me, I will point to the following:

Don’t let you happiness depend on something you may lose. -C.S. Lewis

"I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” -Hunter S. Thompson

Be happy kids, don’t rely on somebody else to give you happiness. You are both lovely, handsome, smart, intelligent and you will do very well in your lives, loved by all and hated by none.

Love you

Baba

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How To Be Happy According to 20 Authors

Writers have a reputation for being introspective, sensitive and passionate. Although the most prolific writers have a melancholic streak, we often forget that a writer is an observer of the human experience. Usually, writing is not born from happiness; it is nurtured by experience, struggle, survival, and inspiration.

"I don’t know what makes a writer, but it probably isn’t happiness." -William Saroyan

Below, you will find twenty quotes on happiness from some of the best authors:

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.” -Mark Twain

“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.” -Ayn Rand

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.” -Chuck Palahniuk

Don’t let you happiness depend on something you may lose. -C.S. Lewis

"I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” -Hunter S. Thompson

"But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.” -Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” -Ernest Hemingway

"And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” -Kurt Vonnegut

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.” -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.” -Sylvia Plath

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.” -Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

"I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.” -Gillian Flynn

"And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear. I swear that I am happy…What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me—my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift…I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing—yes, really absorbing! … I am happy—yes, happy!” -Vladimir Nabokov

"Happiness consists in realising it is all a great strange dream.” -Jack Kerouac, The Lonesome Traveller

"Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.” -Virginia Woolf, Orlando

"Happiness doesn’t lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home." -Dennis LeHane

"Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself." -Alice Walker

"I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I’ve knowed people that just never did get the hang of it." -Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

"People who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you."-Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book