Just in time for the release of Kill Your Darlings, a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg, Slate asks, “Who really said you should ‘kill your darlings’?”
The answer: not Ginsberg or William Faulkner, both of whom the quote is often attributed to, but rather Arthur Quiller-Couch, a writer and academic in England in the early 1900s.
Evidently, Quiller-Couch considered the vast majority of letters to be murderable darlings; he published his work under the pen name “Q.”
One response
I just wrote a post on this exact Quiller-Couch quotation called, “Creative Pros are Stone Cold Killers” 🙂 http://roaringbird.com/murder-your-darlings/
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