Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move; the writer’s job is to go down deep enough to feel that rhythm and let it move memory and imagination to find the words.
​Ursula K. Le Guin
Author of The Left Hand of Darkness
Born October 21, 1929

I like Beryl Bainbridge a great deal, and she is a writer who absolutely demands to be read a second, third, and fourth time. I admire her great courage in leaving so much unsaid and asking the reader to really engage her brain.
​Monica Ali
Author of In the Kitchen
Born October 20, 1967

The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastation of rain forests, and other worldwide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents.
​James Howard Kunstler
Author of World Made by Hand
Born October 19, 1948

One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.
​Kate Grenville
Author of A Room Made of Leaves
Born October 14, 1950

Conscience is the most dangerous thing you possess. If you wake it up, it may destroy you. To live a life of total moral rigor is not necessarily the way to go. It's the path for very few people. Most people need to come up with some kind of middle ground that satisfies their practical, moral, and philosophical esthetic needs.
​John Patrick Shanley
Author of Doubt: A Parable
Born October 13, 1950

Just keep writing, and try to finish that novel. Remember, all authors started exactly where you are right now; the only difference between a published author and a non-published one is that the published author never stopped writing.
​Julie Kagawa
Author of The Iron King
Born October 12, 1982

Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.
​Dan Savage
Author of It Gets Better
Born October 7, 1964

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
​Caroline Gordon
Author of The Women on the Porch
Born October 6, 1894

Fifteen is such a weird age to be. Nobody treats you like an adult, but you desperately want to be one. You still have these childlike aspects, but you're just kind of coming into the world.
​Nick Robinson
BBC Journalist
Born October 5, 1963

I am politically pro-choice, but personally pro-life. I have my faith but refuse to force it on the world at large—especially this world, so brutal and unjust. I cannot make these wrenching personal life and death decisions for others—nor do I believe they should be made by a church run by childless men.
​Julianna Baggott
Author of Burn
Born September 30, 1969

Nature is not evil. The world occasionally shrugs its shoulders, and people get knocked off. The earth, for geological reasons that are well known, is a fairly risky place to live.
​Simon Winchester
Author of Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
Born September 28, 1944

But democracy isn't a state of perfection. It has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance.
​Antonio Tabucchi
Author of Time Ages in a Hurry
Born September 23, 1943

The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world. 
Fay Weldon
Author of The Fat Woman's Joke
​Born September 22, 1931

The mystique and the false glamour of the writing profession grow partly out of a mistaken belief that people who can express profound ideas and emotions have ideas and emotions more profound than the rest of us. It isn't so. The ability to express is a special gift with a special craft to support it and is spread fairly equally among the profound, the shallow, and the mediocre.
​Janet Burroway
Co-Author of Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to a Narrative Craft
Born September 21, 1936

Public schoolboys are not merely conservatives, they are by nature totalitarian reactionaries.
​David Benedictus
Author of You're a Big Boy Now
Born September 16, 1938

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are “unbelievable” are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.
​Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Author of Americanah
Born September 15, 1977

​Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.
David Wojnarowicz  [voy-nah-ROH-vitch]
Creator of the film,  A Fire in My Belly 
Born September 14, 1954

The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.
​Leon Edel
Author of Henry James: A Life
Born September 9, 1907

Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.
Ann Beattie
Author of Chilly Scenes of Winter
Born September 8, 1947

Part of courage is simple consistency.
​Peggy Noonan
Author of The Time of Our Lives
​Born September 7, 1950

You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The facts of life are very stubborn things.
​Cleveland Amory
Author of The Cat Who Came for Christmas
Born September 2, 1917

A major advantage of age is learning to accept people without passing judgment.
​Liz Carpenter
Author of Ruffles and Flourishes
Born September 1, 1920

Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.
​Alan Jay Lerner
Author of My Fair Lady
Born August 31, 1918

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation . . . none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
​Barbara Ehrenreich
Author of Natural Causes
Born August 26, 1941

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
​Martin Amis
Author of Inside Story: A Novel
Born August 24, 1949