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 

Prizes aren’t love. Because people who never met you can’t love you. The slots for winners are already set, from here until Judgment Day. They know the kind of poet who’s going to win, and if you happen to fit the slot, then bully for you! It’s like fitting a hand-me-down suit. It’s luck, not love. Not that it isn’t nice to have luck. [From  Less.]
Andrew Sean Greer
Author of Less
Born November 21, 1970

Sometimes there is such beauty in awkwardness.
​Ruta Sepetys
Author of I Must Betray You
Born November 19, 1967

The idea that women are innately gentle is a fantasy, and a historically recent one. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, is depicted as wreathed in male human skulls; the cruel entertainments of the Romans drew audiences as female as they were male; Boudicca led her British troops bloodily into battle.
​Naomi Wolf
Author of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
Born November 12, 1962

The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.
​Katherine Paterson
Author of Bridge to Terabithia
Born October 31, 1932

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
Thomas Wolfe
Author of You Can't Go Home Again
Born October 3, 1900

Listen, wait, and be patient. Every shaman knows you have to deal with the fire that’s in your audience’s eye.
​Ken Kesey
Author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Born September 17, 1935

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.
​Michael Ondaatje
Author of Divisadero
Born September 12, 1943

On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dark—times neither day nor night—the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they cast a mysterious shadow of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself. 
William Least Heat-Moon
​Author of Blue Highways
Born August 27, 1939

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
​Annie Proulx
Author of Barkskins
​Born August 22, 1935

I don’t know how others reconcile what happened before with what happens now. For me, the past is a cool, dark pond in which I will always stand partially submerged. That’s just the way it is.
​Kate Walbert
Author of A Short History of Women
Born August 13, 1961