Good ideas are often murdered by better ones.
Roddy Doyle, Irish Novelist
​Author of Smile
Born May 8, 1958

It’s technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what’s really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Author of ​Heat and Dust
​Born May 7, 1927

I’m very interested in silence. And, more importantly, in what happens when people aren’t talking on stage. I’m interested in letting actors play and do things between the lines. And in slowing everything down.
​Annie Baker,  American Playwright 
Author of ​The Antipodes
Born May 6, 1981

The difference between being a part-time writer and a full-time writer is like the difference between dating someone and living with them. Some of the romance is gone, but you learn things you’d never know just by dating. 
Scott Westerfeld,  Author of Young Adult Literature
Author of Imposters
Born May 5, 1963

Sex is perhaps like culture—a luxury that only becomes an art after generations of leisurely acquaintance. Why we scarcely approach either as individuals—it’s mass propulsion still!
Alice B. Toklas
Author of ​Murder in the Kitchen
Born April 30, 1877

How lovely they were, those long summer nights: the words and the silences, the sunsets and the stars.
​Polly Samson, British
Author of ​A Theatre for Dreamers
​Born April 29, 1962

I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird . . . I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.
​Harper Lee
Author of To Kill a Mockingbird
​Born April 28, 1926

If life is a teacher, I am like a student who is unable to answer his questions in front of the class. What I wanted was to disappear, to disappear, to disappear from the mocking gazes of the other students. Gone from their sight.
Soe Tjen Marching
Author of The End of Silence: Accounts of the 1965 Genocide in Indonesia
Born April 23, 1971

My parents were mourning the death of my sister. She was killed in a car accident before I was born, and I didn’t know she existed until I was thirteen or fourteen years old. I knew I was growing up in a house where people were angry and sad.
Andrew Hudgins, Poet
Author of A Clown at Midnight: Poems
​Born April 22, 1951 

A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.
​John Millington Synge, Irish Poet, Playwright, & Writer
Author of ​The Tinker's Wedding
​Born April 16, 1871

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Leonardo da Vinci, Artist & Scientist 
​Born April 15, 1452

Just like I know that the stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, or whatever—don’t come in a neat order. Sometimes they return over and over, like waves that alternate between pulling you under and spitting you back onto the shore.
April Henry, Author  of ​Two Truths and a Lie
​Born April 14, 1959

Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay [reparations].
​Nikole Hannah-Jones
​Born April 9, 1976

I'm comfortable with my femininity, and I don't try to change what I look like just because I'm reporting on football at the end of the night. Monday Night Football
Lisa Guerrero
​Born April 8, 1964

Hollywood is a place that attracts people with massive holes in their souls. Author of You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again
Julia Phillips
​Born April 7, 1944

There is one freedom on which all other liberties depend—and that is freedom of expression, freedom of speech, of print. If this is taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at least it would be soon suppressed.
​Leszek Kolakowski
Author of Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: 23 Questions from Great Philosophers
Born October 23, 1927

Beginners who are first starting out sometimes try to write a novel, but they won’t do enough work on it. You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
​Doris Lessing
Author of The Summer Before the Dark
Born October 22, 1919

Some people see art as a matter of control. I see it mostly as a matter of self-control. It’s like this, in me there’s a story that wants to be told. It is my end. I am its means. If I can keep myself, my ego, my wishes and opinions, my mental junk, out of the way, and find the focus of the story, and follow the story, the story will tell itself.
​Ursula K. Le Guin
Author of The Left Hand of Darkness
Born October 21, 1929

Social media is something of a double-edged sword. At its best, social media offers unprecedented opportunities for marginalized people to speak and bring much needed attention to the issues they face. At its worst, social media also offers “everyone” an unprecedented opportunity to share in collective outrage without reflection.
​Roxane Gay
Author of ​Difficult Women
Born October 15, 1974

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

For if my poems have always been about survival—and I believe they have been —then survival too keeps revealing itself as an art of the unexpected.
​Jane Cooper,  Poet
Author of The Weather of Six Mornings
​Born October 9, 1924

It's no disgrace to be Belgian, but one should also not boast about it.
Francisque Sarcey
Author of Mind Your Eyes: Advice to the Short-Sighted by Their Fellow Sufferer
​Born October 8, 1827

African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct.
​Michelle Alexander
Author of ​The New Jim Crow
​Born October 7, 1967 

Any abhorrent behavior is more interesting to me. I’m always amazed when somebody asks me, “Why don’t you write something about nice people?” Because nice people are boring, that’s why.
​Terence Winter
Author of TV Series ​Boardwalk Empire
​Born October 2, 1960

Sometimes there is a greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence.
​Faith Baldwin
Author of The Moon's Our Home
​Born October 1, 1893