Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
​Michael Ondaatje
Born September 12, 1943

I consider myself kind of a reporter—one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.
​Mary Oliver
Born September 10, 1935

I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; sixty percent were either ten years old or older.
​Jonathan Kozol
September 5, 1936

We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight—the light of our particular day.
​Loren Eiseley
Born September 3, 1907

It is curious that, with my somewhat antinomian tendencies, I should have gone to Trinity Hall—which was, and is, before all a Law College—and should thus have been thrown into close touch with the legal element in life.
​Edward Carpenter
Born August 29, 1844

I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
​Jeanette Winterson
Born August 27, 1959

To me, the most beautiful word in the English language is cellar-door. Isn’t it wonderful? The ones I like, though, are “cheque” and “enclosed.”
​Dorothy Parker
Born August 22, 1893

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.
​H. P. Lovecraft
Born August 20, 1890

A WRITER'S WIT
The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters.
​William Maxwell
Born August 16, 1908

I am not altogether confident of my ability to put my thoughts into words: My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. Which is to say that I am not oversensitive in such matters.
​Stieg Larsson
Born on August 15, 1954

I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.
​Tom Perrotta
Born August 13, 1961

A WRITER'S WIT
​
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
     They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
     And add some extra, just for you.
 
But they were fucked up in their turn
     By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
      And half at one another’s throats.
 
Man hands on misery to man.
       It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
       And don’t have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin
Born August 9, 1922

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.
​Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Born August 8, 1896

I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is “In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.”
​Andy Warhol
Born August 6, 1928

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
​Herman Melville
​Born August 1, 1819

If you can't write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don't have a clear idea.
​David Belasco
Born July 25, 1853

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.
​Lauren Groff
Born July 23, 1978

There are two kinds of marriages—where the husband quotes the wife and where the wife quotes the husband.
​Clifford Odets
Born July 18, 1906

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.
​Tony Kushner
Born July 16, 1956

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
​E. B. White
Born July 11, 1899

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
​June Jordan
Born July 9, 1936

One of the things you hope you've done as a playwright is create roles that can sustain different interpretations.
Tracy Letts
Born July 4, 1965

“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.”
From Siddhartha By Herman Hesse 
Born July 2, 1877

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
​Edith Wharton
​Born January 24, 1862

No man,
Til thirty,  should perceive there’s a
plain woman.

​Lord Byron
Born January 22, 1788