If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.
​Muriel Spark
Author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
​Born February 1, 1918

In my newspaper days, your endings could be literally sliced off in the composing room, so it was dangerous to get attached to them. Yet I think this has made me work harder on endings in fiction.
​Laura Lippman
Author of ​Lady in the Lake
​Born January 31, 1959

[On the Netherlands:] There is not a richer or more carefully tilled garden spot in the whole world than this leaky, springy little country.
​Mary Mapes Dodge
Author of ​Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates
​Born January 26, 1831

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony to it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
​Somerset Maugham
Author of Of Human Bondage
Born January 25, 1874

A writer should always have some profession which brings him into close contact with the realities of life.
​Vicki Baum
Author of ​Grand Hotel
Born January 24, 1888

Possible basis for my weltanschauung. That the childishness is never lost, but adulthood put like a veneer over it. We think inside like children, react, and have their desires. The outside manners are an absurd puff of conceit.
​[Diaries and Notebooks 5/19/41, age 20]
​Patricia Highsmith
Author of ​The Two Faces of January
Born January 19, 1921

There is no country in the world with the diversity, confidence and talent and black pride like Nigeria.
​Binyavanga Wainaina
Author of How to Write About Africa
Born January 18, 1971

“Isn't a gay Mormon like an oxymoron?”
“Do I look like an oxymoron to you?”
“An oxymormon.”
​David Ebershoff
Author of ​The Danish Girl
​Born January 13, 1969

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. 
​Jack London
Author of ​White Fang
​Born January 12, 1876

We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
​Aldo Leopold
Author of A Sand County Almanac
​Born January 11, 1887

Most chick singers say “If you hurt me, I'll die”
​. . . I say, “If you hurt me, I'll kick your ass.”
​Pat Benatar
Songwriter: "Hit Me with Your Best Shot"
​Born January 10, 1953

Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.
​Brian Tracy
Author of The Power of Self-Confidence: Become Unstoppable, Irresistible, and Unafraid in Every Area of Your Life
​Born January 5, 1944

Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, “Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place” This is how  we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.
​Natalie Goldberg
Author of Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku
​Born January 4, 1948

Congress wasn't built for members like me. For those of us who have young children, which is a minority, there's definitely the built-in assumption of a two-parent model . . . . There is no template for how to do this in my situation as a single mom.
​Katie Porter
U.S. Representative from California's 45th Congressional District 
​Born January 3, 1974

When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.
​John Banville
Author of ​April in Spain: A Novel
Born December 8, 1945

There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.
​Noam Chomsky
Author of The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change
​Born December 7, 1928

We discovered that peace at any price is no peace at all. We discovered that life at any price has no value whatever; that life is nothing without the privileges, the prides, the rights, the joys which make it worth living, and also worth giving. And we also discovered that there is something more hideous, more atrocious than war or than death; and that is to live in fear.
​Ève Curie
Author of Journey Among Warriors
​Born December 6, 1904

AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease. Yusuf Hamied ​

A man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a figleaf.
​Mark Twain
Author of ​Life on the Mississippi
​Born November 30, 1835

I always write my first draft in longhand, in lined notebooks. I move around the house, sitting where I like, and watch the words spool out in front of me, actually taking a lot of pleasure in the way they look in my strange handwriting on the page.
​Sue Miller
Author of ​The Lake Shore Limited
​Born November 29, 1943

If we cannot see the possibility of greatness, how can we dream it?
​Lee Strasberg
Author of ​A Dream of Passion
​Born November 17, 1901

At dramatic rehearsals, the only author that's better than an absent one is a dead one. 
​George S. Kaufman
Playwright: You Can't Take It with You
Born November 16, 1889

Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
Georgia ​O’Keeffe 
Visual Artist: Oriental Poppies
Born November 15, 1887

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.
John P. Marquand
Author of ​Point of No Return
​Born November 10, 1893

The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.
​Carroll Quigley
Author of ​A Tragedy of Hope
​Born November 9, 1910