I thought it [Diamonds Are Forever] was great fun myself and I only wish that people would write more books of exotic and fantastic adventure instead of whining away in contrived prose about their happy childhood and their ghastly lives in corrugated iron universities.
​Ian Fleming
Born May 28, 1908

I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings—and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.
​Mara Brock Akil
Born May 27, 1970

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.
Alan Hollinghurst
Born May 26, 1954

The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.
Robert Creeley
Born May 21, 1926

I went to work in an office and learned, among other lessons, to do things I did not care for, and to do them well. Before I left this office, two of my books had already been published.
​Sigrid Undset
Born May 20, 1882

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.
​Nora Ephron
Born May 19, 1941

For everyone, there are those moments when you have great days with someone you wouldn't expect to. Then you have to go back to your real lives, but it makes an impression on you.
​Sofia Coppola
​Born May 14, 1971

The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives.
​Armistead Maupin
Born May 18, 1944

Whether you want to entertain or to provoke, to break hearts or reassure them, what you bring to your writing must consist of your longings and disappointments.
​Rafael Yglesias
Born May 12, 1954

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
​Rabindranath Tagore
Born May 7, 1861

We can live with lots of things, but we can't live without imagination, we can't live without hope.
Ariel Dorfman
Born May 6, 1942

I work eight hours a day, but I'm not writing all that time. I'm thinking, editing, looking something up. Thinking is what I do a lot of.
​Barbara Taylor Bradford
Born May 5, 1933

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
​John Crowe Ransom
Born April 30, 1888

I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.
​Jill Paton Walsh
Born April 29, 1937

But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie.
​Roberto Bolaño
Born April 28, 1953

Honestly, I get character ideas from the most inane places. Sometimes a song will give me an idea. Sometimes I will just hear a snippet of conversation that ends up having nothing to do with the book that emerges.
​Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
Born April 16, 1984

The much vaunted male logic isn't logical, because they display prejudices against half the human race that are considered prejudices according to any dictionary definition.
​Eva Figes
Born April 15, 1932

In France we have a saying, “Joie de vivre,” which actually doesn't exist in the English language. It means looking at your life as something that is to be taken with great pleasure and enjoy it.
​Mireille Guiliano
Born April 14, 1946

Men should be judged not by their tint of skin, the gods they serve, the vintage they drink, nor by the way they fight, or love, or sin, but by the quality of the thought they think.
​Adela Florence Nicolson
Born April 9, 1865

Buggers can't be choosers.
​C. M. Bowra
​Born April 8, 1898

My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.
​Donald Barthelme
​Born April 7, 1931

In the playground, I always made people laugh; I used to charge them three pence for an impression of a teacher. It kept me in toffees.
​Sue Townsend
Born April 2, 1946

The thing is, emotion—if it's visibly felt by the writer—will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.
​Anne McCaffrey
Born April 1, 1926

Civil disobedience has an honorable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play.
​Al Gore
Born March 31, 1948

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.
​Tennessee Williams
Born March 26, 1911