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

Though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there: those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.
​Herman Melville
Author of Moby Dick
Born August 1, 1819

I look back on my twenties. It’s supposed to be the prime of your life, the most vital, the most beautiful. But you're making your critical decisions and sometimes your most critical mistakes.
​Ann Brashares
Author of  The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Born July 30, 1967

My husband was an Air Force pilot man years ago and recently an Air Force wife thanked me for my service!
Robyn Carr
Author of Chelynne
Born July 25, 1951

With lacquerware there is an extra beauty in that moment between removing the lid and lifting the bowl to the mouth, when one gazes at the still, silent liquid in the dark depths of the bowl, its colour hardly differing from that of the bowl itself. What lies within the darkness one cannot distinguish, but the palm senses the gentle movements of the liquid, vapour rises from within, forming droplets on the rim, and the fragrance carried upon the vapour brings a delicate anticipation . . . a moment of mystery, it might almost be called, a moment of trance.
Junichiro Tanizaki
Author of The Makioka Sisters
Born July 24, 1886

At the beginning of every semester, I ask my graduate students whether there is something I should read that will help me understand their work.
Alice McDermott
Author of Absolution
Born June 27, 1953

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
​Salman Rushdie
Author of Knife: Meditations
Born June 19, 1947

In a word, man in London is not quite so good a creature as he is out of it.
​John Galt
Author of Voyages and Travels
Born May 2, 1779

I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre.
​Laura Lippman
Author of Lady in the Lake
Born January 31, 1959

Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began.
​John Dufresne
Author of Johnny Too Bad
Born January 30, 1948

Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
​Edith Wharton
Author of Roman Fever
Born January 24, 1862 

In 2001, I moved from Philly to Atlanta, where I lived for six years. I had never lived anywhere but Philly, and you can imagine the culture shock; the Civil War seeps into daily life and conversation down South in a way it never does up North.
Karen Abbott
Author of Where You End: A Novel
Born January 23, 1973

The reason why Hollywood cranks out so many sequels and adaptations is because the audience is so overwhelmed with choices, the only way to get them in the theater is to give them something familiar. 
Jason "David Wong" Pargin
Author of John Dies in the End
Born January 10, 1975

The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. 
​Chinua Achebe
Author of Things Fall Apart
Born November 16, 1930

I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me.  
​     “Have you found work yet?” she asked. “Or are you still just writing?”
​Anne Tyler
Author of ​French Braid: A Novel
​Born October 25, 1941

A WRITER'S WIT
He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all.
​Miguel de Cervantes
Author of 
​Born September 29, 1547

Why aren't these fantasy novels on display somewhere in my house, where there are a thousand-plus other books stacked across a dozen bookshelves? Because bookshelves do more than just hold up our books. They speak to how we see ourselves, and more obviously how we want others to see us. This is a part of my makeup I don't always show.
​Matt Bell
Author of ​Appleseed: A Novel
Born August 29, 1980

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then . . . it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.
​Jonathan Franzen
Author of ​Crossroads
​Born August 17, 1959

A WRITER'S WIT
One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.
​Idries Shah
Author of ​Tales of the Dervishes
​Born June 16, 1924