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

Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.
​Michael Chabon
Author of Wonder Boys
​Born May 24, 1963

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private—a comforting thought.
​Nell Freudenberger
Author of Lost and Wanted
​Born April 21, 1975

A WRITER'S WIT
If birds will abandon their young rather than miss the moment to begin a flight of thousands of miles, what migratory signals might our own cells still hold?
​Gloria Steinem
Author of My Life on the Road
Born March 25, 1934

A WRITER'S WIT
In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.
​Khaled Hosseini
​Author of A Thousand Splendid Suns
​Born March 4, 1965

You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written eleven novels. Many of them haven't written one.
​John Irving
Author of A Prayer for Owen Meany
Born March 2, 1942

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
​Alice Walker
Author of The Color Purple
Born February 9, 1944

A WRITER'S WIT
I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black.
​Neal Shusterman
Author of Thunderhead
​Born November 12, 1962

A WRITER'S WIT
Sometimes we need pure relief. Sometimes we need pure escapism. Sometimes we need major reflection on some aspects of our collective unconscious.
​Marielle Heller, Director
Can You Ever Forgive Me? 
​Born October 1, 1979

A WRITER'S WIT
The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
​Horace Walpole
Author of The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy
Born September 24, 1717

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.
​Chang-Rae Lee
Author of My Year Abroad
Born July 29, 1965

Muzzle a dog and he will bark out of the other end.
​Malcolm Lowry
Author of Under the Volcano
Born July 28, 1909

Philosophy . . . means looking at things which one takes for granted and suddenly seeing that they are very odd indeed.
​Iris Murdoch
Author of The Sea, the Sea
Born July 15, 1919

The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being's journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.
​Irving Stone
Author of The Agony and the Ecstasy
Born July 14, 1903