I advise, if you're stymied by a passage or paragraph or plot point—whether it's for an assignment from the outside world or one that comes only from within—get up from wherever you're sitting, walk outdoors, and do nothing but look at the sky for five minutes. Just stare at that thing. Then execute a small bow and go back in.
​Lydia Millet
Born December 5, 1968

We must level with the people and explain to them that Social Security will first face funding problems in 2042 that can be fixed now with changes that do not undermine and ultimately drain from the entire program.
​Grace Napolitano
Born December 4, 1936

If it bends, it's funny; if it breaks, it's not funny.
​Kate O’Brien
Born December 3, 1897

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down . . . some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.
​Aaron Copland
Born November 14, 1900

Good things come to those who wait . . . far too long.
​William Gibson
Born November 13, 1914

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles,  and see that the world is moving.
​Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Born November 12, 1815

Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this. 
​Guy Gavriel Kay
Born November 7, 1954

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.
​Colley Cibber
Born November 6, 1671

But if politics is an art, it is not like sculpture or painting, where one side acts and the other is passive material. It is more like drama without a script, or dance without choreography—in other words, improvisation. Either player may surprise us again with a new move.
​Thomas Flanagan
Born November 5, 1923

The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called “truth.”
​Dan Rather
Born on October 31, 1931

When people ask me where my roots are, I look down at my feet, and I see the roots of my soul grasping the earth. They are here . . . in the Southwest . . . I still live in New Mexico.
​Rudolfo Anaya
Born October 30, 1937

I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.
​Chester Himes
Born October 29, 1909

You're meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there's a lot to be said for a very happy one that just lets you get on with it.
​Emma Donoghue
Born October 24, 1969

Not having seen Francine in ten years, I ask JH if he thinks she’s dropped me. “No, you merely used each other up: Some friendships are meant to last only a certain time.”
​Ned Rorem
​Born October 23, 1923

It's one thing to reject the idea that it's a man's job to bring home all the bacon; it's another the 500th time your wife reaches for the check at dinner.
​Will Allison
Born October 22, 1968

No one wants to read an apologetic book.
​Patrick Ness
Born October 17, 1971

It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.
​Paul Monette
Born October 16, 1945

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
​Michel Foucault
​Born October 15, 1926

Every writer has to figure out what works best—and often has to select and discard different tools before they find the one that fits.
​Nora Roberts
Born October 10, 1950

You can find heroism everyday, like guys working terrible jobs because they've got to support their families. Or as far as humor, the things I see on the job, on the street, are far funnier than anything you'll ever see on TV.
​Harvey Pekar
Born October 8, 1939

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