What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.
​Chris Bohjalian
Author of The Flight Attendant
Born August 12,1962

One thing the gay rights movement taught the world is the importance of being visible.
Charles M. Blow
Author of Fire Shut Up in My Bones
Born August 11,1970

I guess I'm attracted and repelled by isolation. It scares me. And it's why I tend to write about older characters, too, because for them the stakes are somewhat higher.
​Conor McPherson
​Screenwriter for  film, I Went Down
Born August 6, 1971

I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.
​Haim Ginott
Author of Teacher and Child
Born August 5, 1922

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.
​Knut Hamsun
Author of Growth of the Soil
Born August 4, 1859

Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea that they subsequently express with their hands.
​Giorgio Vasari
Author of Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
Born July 30, 1511

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.
​Susan Blackmore
Author of The Meme Machine
Born July 29,1951

          I am soft sift
     In an hourglass—at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift
     And it crowds and it combs to the
          fall . . . .
​Gerard Manley Hopkins
Author of The Windhover
Born July 28, 1844

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
​Raymond Chandler
Author of The Big Sleep
Born July 23, 1888

Until we are all free, we are none of us free.
​​​​Emma Lazarus, Poet
Author of The New Colossus
Born July 22, 1849

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.
​​Hart Crane, Poet
Author of The Bridge
Born July 21, 1899

I have always considered it despicable to grovel for your life as if life were a favor. If you cannot live the way you want, there is no point in living.
​Reinaldo Arenas,  Author of Before Night Falls
Born July 16, 1943

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.
​Richard Russo, Author of Everybody's Fool
Born July 15, 1949

​Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness.
​Frank Raymond Leavis,
Author of D. H. Lawrence Novelist
Born July 14, 1895

​It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: “So, that's what I really thought about this thing.” Then it feels part of me.
Amélie Nothomb, Author of Soif
Born July 9, 1966

I like to call it nighttime brain: the way your mind seems to function on a different frequency than it does during daylight hours—which can be good or bad but also can lead to unexpected epiphanies or experiences that wouldn't be the same at any other time of day.
​Erin Morgenstern, Author of The Starless Sea
Born July 8, 1978

By limiting or denying freedom of speech and expression, we take away a lot of potential. We take away thoughts and ideas before they even have the opportunity to hatch. We build a world around negatives—you can't say, think, or do this or that.
​Jill McCorkle, Author of Life After Life
Born July 7, 1957

If I don't like someone and I start reading their stuff, it seems like my brain will just automatically start criticizing everything that's there. It's really hard to read a book without having all this outside information telling you what to think about it.
​Tao Lin, Author of Taipei 
Born July 2, 1983

Most of my writing takes place at a cramped desk in a cramped apartment, so whenever I get to write on a train or make notes on a road trip, it has an entirely different cadence. And I can remember specific writing sessions while on a train through beautiful countryside in a way I can remember almost nothing else.
​Genevieve Valentine,
​Author of The Girls at the Kingfisher Club
Born July 1, 1981

If I could make Panther tough, mysterious, wily, and often at odds with his Avengers comrades, that was a character I'd find interesting.
​​Christopher Priest, Author of ​The Black Panther
Born June 30, 1961

I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.
​Larry Kramer, Author of Faggots
Born June 25, 1935

I try to use all of my senses when describing a setting, and try to think of everything that would impact a character in any given scene.
​Mercedes Lackey, ​Author of Arrows of the Queen
Born June 24, 1950

Don't be dismayed by good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.
​Richard Bach, Author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Born June 23, 1936

One of the soundest rules I try to remember when making forecasts in the field of economics is that whatever is to happen is happening already.
​Sylvia Field Porter,
​Author of Sylvia Porter's Money Book
Born June 18, 1913

I don't steal stories. If I'm a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.
​Kerry Greenwood, Author of Murder in the Dark
Born June 17, 1954