I probably reread novels more often than I read new ones. The novel form is made for rereading. Novels are by their nature too long, too baggy, too full of things—you can't hold them completely in your mind. This isn't a flaw—it's part of the novel's richness.
​Tessa Hadley
Author of ​Late in the Day
​Born February 28, 1956

A WRITER'S WIT
My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.
​​Jane Hirshfield
Author of ​Nine Gates
​Born February 24, 1953

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
​W. E. B. Du Bois
Author of 
Born February 23, 1868

Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.
​Christopher Bram
Author of Surprising Myself
Born February 22, 1952

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
​Anaïs Nin
Author of Henry and June
​Born February 21, 1903

A WRITER'S WIT
​Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
​Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Author of The Deepening Stream
​Born February 17,  1879

I've heard people on panels say, “You must have a Web site. You need to tweet. Repeat the title of your book constantly,” and I just want to say, “Shut up. Everything you're saying is wrong.” People will know instantly if your only motivation for tweeting is to sell books.
​Maureen Johnson
Author of ​The Box in the Woods
​Born February 16, 1973

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
​Alfred North Whitehead
Author of ​Process and Reality
Born February 15, 1861

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. [Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. April 1886]
​Frederick Douglass
Author of ​Escape from Slavery
​Born February 14, 1817 [Attributed]

A WRITER'S WIT
Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.
​Boris Pasternak
Author of Doctor Zhivago
Born February 10, 1890

I am a drinker with writing problems.
​Brendan Behan, Playwright
Author of The Quare Fellow
Born February 9, 1923

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
​Elizabeth Bishop
Poet, Author of Geography III
Born February 8, 1911

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters twenty times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you’ll have to do that too.
​Peter Carey
Author of Oscar and Lucinda
​Born February 7, 1943

A WRITER'S WIT
The greatest mistake is the trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
​Walter Bagehot
Author of ​The English Constitution
​Born February 3, 1826

Had there been a lunatic asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis.
​Havelock Ellis
Author of ​Studies in the Psychology of Sex
​Born February 2, 1859

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.
​Muriel Spark
Author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
​Born February 1, 1918