I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming . . .  . This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it’s no longer so. I feel happy—deep down. All is well.
​Katherine Mansfield
Author of ​The Garden Party and Other Stories
​Born October 14, 1888

I'm one of those writers who can’t talk about what they’re working on. The entire four years I was writing “House of Sand and Fog,” my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.
​Andre Dubus III
Author of House of Sand and Fog
​Born September 11, 1959

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.
Antonia Fraser
Author of ​Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit
​Born August 27, 1932

A WRITER'S WIT
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
​Herman Melville
Author of ​Moby-Dick
Born August 1,  1819

In a competitive society, the thing people fear the most is love.
​James Purdy
Author of ​In a Shallow Grave
​Born July 17, 1914

Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.
Reinaldo Arenas
Author of ​Before Night Falls
​Born July 16, 1943

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
​Iris Murdoch
Author of ​The Sea, the Sea
​Born July 15, 1919

I disagree with the advice of “write about what you know.” Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.
​Donald Windham
Author of ​Emblems of Conduct
​Born July 2, 1920

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
​Salman Rushdie
Author of ​The Satanic Verses
​Born June 19, 1947

As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I'm more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.
​Meg Wolitzer
​Author of ​The Interestings
​Born May 28, 1959

The older books were quite light-hearted. But I think most of my novels do end on a deep note of pessimism. Shadows seem to be closing in. The final conclusion isn’t that life is wonderful and everything is bright and cheery and in the garden.
​Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Author of ​A Lovesong for India
​Born May 7, 1927

Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.
​Isak Dinesen
Author of ​Out of Africa 
Born April 17, 1885

There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it.
​Jesmyn Ward
Author of Let Us Descend
Born April 1, 1977

I guess I think that sex and desire and humiliation are central to my experience of consciousness—to my experience of humanness—and I wanted to explore the ways that they circle around and approach and fail to add up to love, or the ways that those three terms—sex, desire, love—can in some lights seem synonymous and in others like elements entirely alien to one another.
Garth Greenwell
Author of Cleanness
Born March 19, 1978

Photography forces one out into the world, interacting with people and the environment. It flexes all those right brain, spatially-adept muscles.
​Deborah Copaken Kogan
Author of Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War
Born March 11, 1966

The truth of the matter is, you lose a parent to murder when you’re ten years old, and in fact at the time of the murder you hate your lost parent, my mother in my case.
​James Ellroy
​Author of The Black Dahlia
Born March 4, 1948

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
​John Steinbeck
Author of Cannery Row
Born February 27, 1902

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
​Amy Tan
Author of The Opposite of Fate
Born February 19, 1952

At no point in my life have I ever felt as though I were an American.
Toni Morrison
Author of Beloved
Born February 18, 1931

You know what I worry about? I worry that kids today don't have enough time to just sit and daydream.
​Judy Blume
Author of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing 
Born February 12, 1938

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.
​Shirley Hazzard
Author of The Great Fire
Born January 30, 1931

A woman with opinions had better develop a thick skin and a loud voice.
​Anya Seton 
Author of The Winthrop Woman
Born January 23, 1904

I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school,  I started with novels.
​M. K. Hobson
Author of The Native Star
Born January 21, 1969

Women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
​Zora Neale Hurston
Author of Mules and Men
Born January 7, 1891

For the judging of contemporary literature the only test is one's personal taste. If you much like a new book, you must call it literature even though you find no other soul to agree with you, and if you dislike a book you must declare that it is not literature though a million voices should shout you that you are wrong. The ultimate decision will be made by Time.
​Ford Madox Ford
​Author of The Good Soldier
Born December 17, 1873