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

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 

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

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it’s also full of fourth-rate readers.
​Barbara Walters
Co-Author of How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything
Born September 25, 1929

You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.
​F. Scott Fitzgerald
Author of The Great Gatsby
Born September 24, 1896

Like my mother, I was always saying, “I'll fix my life one day.” It became clear when I saw her die without fulfilling her dreams that my time was now or maybe never.
​Liz Murray,  Memoirist and Speaker
Subject of Film, ​Homeless to Harvard
​Born September 23, 1980

Capitalism is not an economic system, but a world-outlook, or rather,  a part of a whole world-outlook.
​Francis Parker Yockey (Ulick Varange, pseud.)
American Author
​Born September 18, 1917

I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
​Cheryl Strayed
Author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
​Born September 17, 1968

Liberty is to the collective body,  what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
​Lord Bolingbroke
Author of The Idea of a Patriot King
Born September 16, 1678

I'm one of those writers who can’t talk about what they’re working on. The entire four years I was writing “House of Sand and Fog,” my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.
​Andre Dubus III
Author of House of Sand and Fog
​Born September 11, 1959

Humans are insane. We kill our own people, starve our own people, sell them, work them to death, beat them, don’t give them affordable/free/good healthcare, and let them live in misery, while a few of us have—we have all we want. We are evil.
​Faith Hunter
Author of Junkyard Cats
​Born September 10, 1971

If you haven't taken a writing class, take a writing class. I took every class that was available in my area. I went to conferences inside and outside my area to network with people. That's how I got my agent. I found my agent through another agent who was at a conference. 
​Kimberly Willis Holt
Author of The Hurricane Girls
​Born September 9, 1960

The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.
​Richard Wright
Author of ​Black Boy
​Born September 4, 1908

Don't worry about never having time to write. Just write what you can in the time you do have and give yourself a big clap on the back, followed by a double latte and a blueberry muffin.
​Rachel Johnson
Author of ​Rake's Progress: My Political Midlife Crisis 
​Born September 3, 1965

One can't live with a child of Holocaust survivors without absorbing some of the same sensibilities that her parents transmitted to her as a young girl. It is an unspoken dread, a sense of fragility, an anxious anticipation of unseen horrors. 
Kai Bird
Author of ​American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer 
​Born September 2 1951

Studios, because they are investing a great deal of money in movies, they want a guarantee that when they hire somebody that person can deliver for them. Everything is fear based, so they pigeonhole people. But I've written everything, from Westerns to sci-fi to dramedy,  I've done it all. 
​Melissa Rosenberg, Television and Screen Writer
​Author of The Twilight Saga Movie Series
Born August 28, 1962

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.
Antonia Fraser
Author of ​Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit
​Born August 27, 1932