Joy does not kill any more than sorrow. 
Margaret Hill McCarter
Author of A Master’s Degree
Born May 2, 1860

The rarest of all things in American life is charm. We spend billions every year manufacturing fake charm that goes under the heading of public relations. Without it,  America would be grim indeed.
​Anita Loos
Author of ​Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
​Born April 26, 1893

One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.
​Jeffrey Eugenides
Author of ​Middlesex
​Born March 8, 1960

I probably reread novels more often than I read new ones. The novel form is made for rereading. Novels are by their nature too long, too baggy, too full of things—you can't hold them completely in your mind. This isn't a flaw—it's part of the novel's richness.
​Tessa Hadley
Author of ​Late in the Day
​Born February 28, 1956

A WRITER'S WIT
My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.
​​Jane Hirshfield
Author of ​Nine Gates
​Born February 24, 1953

Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.
​Christopher Bram
Author of Surprising Myself
Born February 22, 1952

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

[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

“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 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

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

Because music is a language unto itself, when I'm writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.
​Marianne Wiggins
Author of ​Properties of Thirst
​Born November 8, 1947

A WRITER'S WIT
I'm not an artist. I tell inappropriate stories and jokes and I try to make people laugh.
​Kathy Griffin
For Your Consideration (CD)
​Born November 4, 1960

The one thing you have to avoid when you’re writing is being afraid, because everybody makes you afraid. The critics will make you afraid. Your professors will make you afraid. The writers who teach you will make you afraid. Your friends make you afraid. Your parents make you afraid. Society makes you afraid. Everybody has ways of putting you down as a writer.
​Pat Conroy
Author of The Great Santini
Born October 26, 1945

If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.
​Anne Tyler
Author of ​The Accidental Tourist
​Born October 25, 1941

I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn't make me love the less successful one any less.
​Alex Haley
Author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family
​Born August 11, 1921

A WRITER'S WIT
Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic.​
Susan Blackmore
Author of Ten Zen Questions
​Born July 29, 1951

Success is like some horrible disaster
Worse than your house burning.
​Malcolm Lowry
Author of ​Under the Volcano
Born July 28, 1909

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
​Aldous Huxley
Author of Brave New World
​Born July 26, 1894

My role models were childlesss: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës.
​Joyce Carol Oates
Author of Blonde
​Born June 16, 1938

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
​Thomas Hardy
Author of Far from the Madding Crowd
​Born June 2, 1840