When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.
J. K. Rowling
Author of the Harry Potter Fantasy Series 
​Born July 31, 1965

The corset is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject’s vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work.
Thorstein Veblen
Author of ​The Theory of the Leisure Class
​Born July 30, 1857

Somerset Maugham said that it took at least six human beings to make one fictional character. That is true of landscape as well, I think. We have to make our landscapes, change streets, create new turnings, rebuild or tear down, change time,  and even nature,  if need be.
Mary Lee Settle
Author of ​Turkish Reflections
​Born July 29, 1918

Time is not a linear flow, as we think it is, into past, present, and future. Time is an indivisible whole, a great pool in which all events are eternally embodied and still have their meaningful flash of supernormal or extrasensory perception, and glimpse of something that happened long ago in our linear time.
​​Frank Waters
Author of ​Book of the Hopi
Born July 25, 1902

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.
​Zelda Fitzgerald
Author of ​Save Me the Waltz
​Born July 24, 1900

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few [sic] and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.
​Lauren Groff
Author of Florida
Born July 23, 1978

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalizing; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that nonfiction has to be real in some absolute sense.
​David Shields
Author of ​Reality Hunger
​Born July 22, 1956

A WRITER'S WIT
A woman who dared to live as an overt homosexual in such unwelcoming times might well have an ego of impressive strength and health that permitted her it know her own mind and to be true to her conception of herself.
​Lillian Faderman
Author of ​Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death
​Born July 18, 1940

In a competitive society, the thing people fear the most is love.
​James Purdy
Author of ​In a Shallow Grave
​Born July 17, 1914

Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.
Reinaldo Arenas
Author of ​Before Night Falls
​Born July 16, 1943

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
​Iris Murdoch
Author of ​The Sea, the Sea
​Born July 15, 1919

A WRITER'S WIT
A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.
​Pauline Phillips [Abigail Van Buren]
Author of Where Were You When President Kennedy Was Shot? Memories and Tributes to a Slain President​
​Born July 4, 1918

We grovel and “worship” and pray to God to do what we ourselves ought to have done a thousand years ago, and can do now, as soon as we choose.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Author of ​The Yellow Wallpaper 
​Born July 3, 1860

I disagree with the advice of “write about what you know.” Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.
​Donald Windham
Author of ​Emblems of Conduct
​Born July 2, 1920

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that’s very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.
​Blake Bailey
Author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates
Born July 1, 1963