I write only in order to make myself well. I write in an attempt to become normal, to be like everybody else, even though it's obvious I am not. I am a neurotic creature, a prey to phobias, burdened with obsessions and anxieties. And instead of going to a psychoanalyst or committing suicide or abandoning myself to drink and drugs, I write. That's my therapy.
​Severa Sarduy
Author of Beach Birds
Born February 25, 1937

The wrong way always seems the more reasonable.
​George Moore
Author of Hail and Farewell
Born February 24, 1852

Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
​W. E. B. Du Bois
Author of Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880
Born February 23, 1868

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
​Toni Morrison
Author of Paradise
Born February 18, 1931

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.
​Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Author of The Squirrel-Cage
Born February 17, 1879

Writing is the only thing I’ve ever done with persistence, except for being married.
​Richard Ford
Author of Rock Springs
Born February 16, 1944

A WRITER'S WIT
The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.
​Judy Blume
Author of Forever
Born February 12, 1938

Some thirty years after graduation, I look at my Caltech classmates and conclude that math whizzes do not take over the world.
​Sandra Tsing Loh
Author of The Madwoman in the Volvo
Born February 11, 1962

Stay true to your own voice, and don't worry about needing to be liked or what anybody else thinks. Keep your eyes on your own paper.
​Laura Dern
Actor in HBO's Big Little Lies
Born February 10, 1967

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in one's more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.
​J. M. Coetzee
Author of Disgrace
Born February 9, 1940

A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree.
​Gretel Ehrlich
Author of This Cold Heaven:
​Seven Seasons in Greenland
Born January 21, 1946

All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.
​Robert Olen Butler
Author of Perfume River 
Born January 20, 1945

I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.
​Patricia Highsmith
Author of The Talented Mr. Ripley
Born January 19, 1921

Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last.
​Maureen Dowd
Author of The Year of Voting Dangerously
Born January 14, 1952

The one thing that is sort of sneered at and not really believed is bisexuality. Any bisexual man is just seen as a closeted gay man. That shows how narrow-minded people are. The other thing that's totally neglected and which nobody approves of is celibacy. People again assume that you're just repressing something.
​Edmund White
Author of The Beautiful Room Is Empty
Born January 13, 1940

It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
​Edmund Burke
Author of Reflections on the French Revolution
Born January 12, 1729

It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.
​Joyce Maynard
Author of The Best of Us: A Memoir
Born November 5, 1953

Why do children dread mathematics? Because of the wrong approach. Because it is looked at as a subject.
​Shakuntala Devi
Author of Figuring the Joy of Numbers
Born November 4, 1929

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.
​Martin Cruz Smith
Author of Gorky Park
Born November 3, 1942

GPS works great. I recommend it for all cat owners who want to know what their cats do when they're not there, if you can stand the ridicule from your friends.
​Caroline Paul
Author of Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology
Born October 29, 1963

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
​Evelyn Waugh
Author of Brideshead Revisited
Born on October 28, 1903

If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey.
​A. N. Wilson
Author of The Mystery of Charles Dickens
Born October 27, 1950

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
​Doris Lessing
Author of The Summer Before the Dark
Born October 22, 1919

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
​Ursula K. Le Guin
Author of Farthest Shore
Born October 21, 1929

I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.
​Arthur Rimbaud
Author of A Season in Hell
Born October 20, 1854