In my newspaper days, your endings could be literally sliced off in the composing room, so it was dangerous to get attached to them. Yet I think this has made me work harder on endings in fiction.
​Laura Lippman
Author of ​Lady in the Lake
​Born January 31, 1959

A WRITER'S WIT
Curtsy while you’re thinking what to say. It saves time.
​Lewis Carroll
Author of ​Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
​Born January 27, 1832

[On the Netherlands:] There is not a richer or more carefully tilled garden spot in the whole world than this leaky, springy little country.
​Mary Mapes Dodge
Author of ​Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates
​Born January 26, 1831

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony to it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
​Somerset Maugham
Author of Of Human Bondage
Born January 25, 1874

A writer should always have some profession which brings him into close contact with the realities of life.
​Vicki Baum
Author of ​Grand Hotel
Born January 24, 1888

A WRITER'S WIT
Free societies are societies in which the right of dissent is protected.
​Natan Sharansky
Author of Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People
​Born January 20, 1948

Possible basis for my weltanschauung. That the childishness is never lost, but adulthood put like a veneer over it. We think inside like children, react, and have their desires. The outside manners are an absurd puff of conceit.
​[Diaries and Notebooks 5/19/41, age 20]
​Patricia Highsmith
Author of ​The Two Faces of January
Born January 19, 1921

There is no country in the world with the diversity, confidence and talent and black pride like Nigeria.
​Binyavanga Wainaina
Author of How to Write About Africa
Born January 18, 1971

“Isn't a gay Mormon like an oxymoron?”
“Do I look like an oxymoron to you?”
“An oxymormon.”
​David Ebershoff
Author of ​The Danish Girl
​Born January 13, 1969

 A WRITER'S WIT
If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.
​Lorrie Moore
Author of ​Anagrams
​Born January 13, 1957

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. 
​Jack London
Author of ​White Fang
​Born January 12, 1876

We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
​Aldo Leopold
Author of A Sand County Almanac
​Born January 11, 1887

Most chick singers say “If you hurt me, I'll die”
​. . . I say, “If you hurt me, I'll kick your ass.”
​Pat Benatar
Songwriter: "Hit Me with Your Best Shot"
​Born January 10, 1953

A WRITER'S WIT
I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.
​Elizabeth Strout
Author of Amy and Isabelle
​Born January 6, 1956

Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.
​Brian Tracy
Author of The Power of Self-Confidence: Become Unstoppable, Irresistible, and Unafraid in Every Area of Your Life
​Born January 5, 1944

Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, “Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place” This is how  we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.
​Natalie Goldberg
Author of Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku
​Born January 4, 1948

Congress wasn't built for members like me. For those of us who have young children, which is a minority, there's definitely the built-in assumption of a two-parent model . . . . There is no template for how to do this in my situation as a single mom.
​Katie Porter
U.S. Representative from California's 45th Congressional District 
​Born January 3, 1974