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

All our talents increase in the using, and every faculty, both good and bad, strengthens by exercise: therefore, if you choose to use the bad, or those which tend to evil till they become your masters, and neglect the good till they dwindle away, you have only yourself to blame.
​Anne Brontë
​Born January 17, 1820

I just loved jokes so much as a child. I remember wanting to perform at, like . . . age seven by reading from a kids’ joke book, and my parents being like, “That's not what standup comedy is,” and me being like, “Not yet it isn't! I'm going to change the game.”
​Josh Gondelman
Born January 15, 1985

Money makes people bold and cosmopolitan; if you are poor, you are naturally conservative. It's not easy to be a bohemian when you have to worry about what is going to happen with you and with your next paycheck.
​Antonio Muñoz Molina
Born on January 10, 1956

When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.
​Dave Eggers
Born on January 8, 1970

You must never lose that touch of childishness. You need it if you wish to write for children, if you wish to understand the heart of a child. Children are good, you see. And they expect good.
​Carolyn Haywood
Born January 3, 1898

I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority. I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends' lives.
​Steven Spielberg
Born on December 18, 1947

Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys.
​Emma Bull
Born December 13, 1954

Great artists have no country.
​Alfred de Musset
Born December 11, 1810

The thing about having a very young audience in the theatre is that sometimes they laugh at the bullying scenes. It's really interesting, what that means. It still confuses me slightly, you know; someone's getting quite brutally bullied on stage and people are laughing. I think it's very hard being young.
​Jack Thorne
Born December 6, 1978

We must work to stabilize Social Security. We must not gamble with our nation's social insurance program, one of our most popular and effective federal programs that has remained dependable and stable for the past seventy years.
​Grace Napolitano
Born December 4, 1936

I wish the whole day were like breakfast, when people are still connected to their dreams, focused inward, and not yet ready to engage with the world around them. I realized this is how I am all day; for me, unlike other people, there doesn't come a moment after a cup of coffee or a shower or whatever when I suddenly feel alive and awake and connected to the world. If it were always breakfast, I would be fine.
​Peter Cameron
​Born on November 29, 1959

I have let half-decades elapse between books because books have to be written and writing is awful, but if you are the type of person who makes things, there is no profit in worrying about how or why or when the next project will come into being beyond simply acknowledging that it is inevitable that it will be very soon.
​David Rakoff
​Born on November 27, 1964

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
​André Gide
Born November 22,1869

Nothing on earth can make up for the loss of one who has loved you.
​Selma Lagerlöf
Born on November 20, 1858

It is my belief that I have informed myself of nearly all works of art in the known world . . . . I have heard most of the music of the world, and seen nearly all the paintings.
​Sacheverell Sitwell
Born on November 15, 1897

Society has a hyper emphasis on thin, and that trend comes from the consumers—it does not come from the fashion industry. The fashion industry needs to make money; that's what we do. If people said, “We want a 300 pound purple person,” the first industry to do it would be fashion.
​Kelly Cutrone
Born on November 13, 1965

Why do people talk of the horrors of old age? It's great. I feel like a fine old car with the parts gradually wearing out, but I'm not complaining . . . . Those who find growing old terrible are people who haven't done what they wanted with their lives.
​Martha Gellhorn
Born on November 8, 1908

Progress would be wonderful—if only it would stop.
​Robert Musil
​Born on November 6, 1880

These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse.
​Stephen Crane
Born November 1, 1871

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
​Paul Valéry
​Born October 30, 1871

I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life—duties, intellect, accomplishment—and see that most of it is nonsense.
​Harold Brodkey
Born October 25, 1930

Gravity ages us. After forty our jowls, armpits, breasts and buttocks sag toward the impatient earth. Lean over a glass table and see yourself as you will be in ten years. Now throw back your head, and see how you once were. Like every living thing always, we are all corpses on parole.
Ned Rorem
Born October 23, 1923

I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives.
​Ntozake Shange
Born October 18, 1948