A WRITER'S WIT
While I am watching the birds I believe I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation.
​Anna Kavan
​Born April 10, 1901 

Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay [reparations].
​Nikole Hannah-Jones
​Born April 9, 1976

I'm comfortable with my femininity, and I don't try to change what I look like just because I'm reporting on football at the end of the night. Monday Night Football
Lisa Guerrero
​Born April 8, 1964

Hollywood is a place that attracts people with massive holes in their souls. Author of You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again
Julia Phillips
​Born April 7, 1944

A WRITER'S WIT                                                             
Good schools, like good societies and good families, celebrate and cherish diversity.
Deborah Meier 
​Born April 6, 1931 ​

 A WRITER'S WIT 
In the contemporary world, we think of politeness as surface behavior, like frosting—it’s sweet and attractive and finishes off the cake. But 19th century nobility and the enlightened thinkers and stoics before them viewed manners in a very different way. To them, manners are an outward expression of an inward struggle.
​Amor Towles
Author of ​Table for Two: Fictions
​Born October 24, 1964

There is one freedom on which all other liberties depend—and that is freedom of expression, freedom of speech, of print. If this is taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at least it would be soon suppressed.
​Leszek Kolakowski
Author of Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: 23 Questions from Great Philosophers
Born October 23, 1927

Beginners who are first starting out sometimes try to write a novel, but they won’t do enough work on it. You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
​Doris Lessing
Author of The Summer Before the Dark
Born October 22, 1919

Some people see art as a matter of control. I see it mostly as a matter of self-control. It’s like this, in me there’s a story that wants to be told. It is my end. I am its means. If I can keep myself, my ego, my wishes and opinions, my mental junk, out of the way, and find the focus of the story, and follow the story, the story will tell itself.
​Ursula K. Le Guin
Author of The Left Hand of Darkness
Born October 21, 1929

A WRITER'S WIT
I've yet to meet a writer who could change water into wine,  and we have a tendency to treat them like that.
​Michael Tolkin, Screenwriter
Author of film,  The Offer
​Born October 17, 1950

You can declare at the very start that it’s impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behind your back, so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels.
​Günter Grass
Author of The Tin Drum
​Born October 16, 1927

Social media is something of a double-edged sword. At its best, social media offers unprecedented opportunities for marginalized people to speak and bring much needed attention to the issues they face. At its worst, social media also offers “everyone” an unprecedented opportunity to share in collective outrage without reflection.
​Roxane Gay
Author of ​Difficult Women
Born October 15, 1974

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming . . .  . This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it’s no longer so. I feel happy—deep down. All is well.
​Katherine Mansfield
Author of ​The Garden Party and Other Stories
​Born October 14, 1888

For if my poems have always been about survival—and I believe they have been —then survival too keeps revealing itself as an art of the unexpected.
​Jane Cooper,  Poet
Author of The Weather of Six Mornings
​Born October 9, 1924

It's no disgrace to be Belgian, but one should also not boast about it.
Francisque Sarcey
Author of Mind Your Eyes: Advice to the Short-Sighted by Their Fellow Sufferer
​Born October 8, 1827

African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct.
​Michelle Alexander
Author of ​The New Jim Crow
​Born October 7, 1967 

A WRITER'S WIT
We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us.
​Gore Vidal
Author of ​Myra Breckinridge 
​Born October 3, 1925

Any abhorrent behavior is more interesting to me. I’m always amazed when somebody asks me, “Why don’t you write something about nice people?” Because nice people are boring, that’s why.
​Terence Winter
Author of TV Series ​Boardwalk Empire
​Born October 2, 1960

Sometimes there is a greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence.
​Faith Baldwin
Author of The Moon's Our Home
​Born October 1, 1893

As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn't serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self understanding and this is something that can't be taught.
Laura Esquivel
Author of ​Like Water for Chocolate
​Born September 30, 1950

A WRITER'S WIT
The immature poet imitates; the mature poet plagiarizes.
T. S. Eliot,  Poet
Author of ​Four Quartets
Born September 26, 1888