Good ideas are often murdered by better ones.
Roddy Doyle, Irish Novelist
​Author of Smile
Born May 8, 1958

It’s technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what’s really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Author of ​Heat and Dust
​Born May 7, 1927

I’m very interested in silence. And, more importantly, in what happens when people aren’t talking on stage. I’m interested in letting actors play and do things between the lines. And in slowing everything down.
​Annie Baker,  American Playwright 
Author of ​The Antipodes
Born May 6, 1981

The difference between being a part-time writer and a full-time writer is like the difference between dating someone and living with them. Some of the romance is gone, but you learn things you’d never know just by dating. 
Scott Westerfeld,  Author of Young Adult Literature
Author of Imposters
Born May 5, 1963

A WRITER'S WIT
When you're eleven or twelve years old, you can get so swept up in a book that you start to believe that the fantasy is reality. I think when you have a giant crush when you're in fifth grade, it becomes your whole world. It's like being underwater; everything is different.
Wes Anderson
Film Director, Moonrise Kingdom
Born May 1,  1969

Sex is perhaps like culture—a luxury that only becomes an art after generations of leisurely acquaintance. Why we scarcely approach either as individuals—it’s mass propulsion still!
Alice B. Toklas
Author of ​Murder in the Kitchen
Born April 30, 1877

How lovely they were, those long summer nights: the words and the silences, the sunsets and the stars.
​Polly Samson, British
Author of ​A Theatre for Dreamers
​Born April 29, 1962

I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird . . . I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.
​Harper Lee
Author of To Kill a Mockingbird
​Born April 28, 1926

A WRITER'S WIT
Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
​Robert Penn Warren
Author of ​All the King's Men
​Born April 24, 1905

If life is a teacher, I am like a student who is unable to answer his questions in front of the class. What I wanted was to disappear, to disappear, to disappear from the mocking gazes of the other students. Gone from their sight.
Soe Tjen Marching
Author of The End of Silence: Accounts of the 1965 Genocide in Indonesia
Born April 23, 1971

My parents were mourning the death of my sister. She was killed in a car accident before I was born, and I didn’t know she existed until I was thirteen or fourteen years old. I knew I was growing up in a house where people were angry and sad.
Andrew Hudgins, Poet
Author of A Clown at Midnight: Poems
​Born April 22, 1951 

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.
​Charlotte Brontë
Author of ​Jane Eyre
Born April 21, 1816

A WRITER'S WIT
A woman must marry the man who loves her but never the one she loves; that is the secret of lasting happiness.
​Mariama Bâ, Senegalese Author and Feminist
​Author of ​Scarlet Song
Born April 17, 1929

A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.
​John Millington Synge, Irish Poet, Playwright, & Writer
Author of ​The Tinker's Wedding
​Born April 16, 1871

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Leonardo da Vinci, Artist & Scientist 
​Born April 15, 1452

Just like I know that the stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, or whatever—don’t come in a neat order. Sometimes they return over and over, like waves that alternate between pulling you under and spitting you back onto the shore.
April Henry, Author  of ​Two Truths and a Lie
​Born April 14, 1959

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