In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
​Doris Lessing
Author of The Summer Before the Dark
Born October 22, 1919

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
​Ursula K. Le Guin
Author of Farthest Shore
Born October 21, 1929

I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.
​Arthur Rimbaud
Author of A Season in Hell
Born October 20, 1854

Technology . . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
​C. P.  Snow
Author of Corridors of Power
Born October 15, 1905

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
​Katherine Mansfield
Author of The Garden Party
Born October 14, 1888

Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it.
​Ernest K. Gann
Author of Fate is the Hunter
Born October 13, 1910

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
​John W. Gardner
Author of On Leadership
Born October 8, 1912

Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.
​Elizabeth Janeway
Author of Man's World, Woman's Place: A Study in Social Mythology
Born October 7, 1913

What troubles me is not that movie stars run for office, but that they find it easy to get elected. It should be difficult. It should be difficult for millionaires, too.
​Shana Alexander
Author of Very Much a Lady
Born October 6, 1925

I think that the first men to land on Pluto are going to make some very astonishing discoveries. But I am also sure that they will never go there in rockets. They will have to make the immense trip by some more powerful means—like the anti-gravitational drive.
​Donald A. Wollheim
Author of Secret of the Ninth Planet
Born October 1, 1914

At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination: If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can’t forget it . . . it will haunt you until it’s written.
​Truman Capote
Author of In Cold Blood
Born September 30 1924

With the big publishers, they publish fifty books and promote five.
​Marissa Moss
Author of Amelia's Notebook
Born September 29, 1959

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.
​Eavan Boland
Author of A Woman without a Country: Poems
Born September 24, 1944

We've forgotten how to remember, and just as importantly, we've forgotten how to pay attention. So, instead of using your smartphone to jot down crucial notes, or Googling an elusive fact, use every opportunity to practice your memory skills. Memory is a muscle, to be exercised and improved.
​Joshua Foer
Author of Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guid to the World's Hidden Wonders
Born September 23, 1982

The theme of Death is to Poetry what Mistaken Identity is to Drama.
​Dannie Abse
​Author of The Presence
Born September 22, 1923

Although I’m a retired teenager, I remember what it was like to be one. I could have sworn I was riding an emotional roller coaster most of the time. Looking back, I’m actually amazed that I survived.
​Sean Covey
Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens
Born September 17, 1964

I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and scared. And when you're desperate and scared you scapegoat people. It exacerbates latent tendencies toward—well, toward racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism.
​Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Author of Finding Your Roots
Born September 16, 1950

There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.
​Agatha Christie
Author of Murder on the Orient Express
Born September 15, 1890

I took this “how to build computers” course basically because I'm sick and tired of getting ripped off by cheesy computer companies. Software baffles me. I like hardware. I used to change my own oil, and now I want to build my own computer so I can have what I want. 
​Pat Cadigan
Author of Tea from an Empty Cup
Born September 10, 1953

Death by starvation is slow.
​Mary Hunter Austin
Author of The Land of Journeys' Ending
Born September 9, 1868

You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story. 
​Ann Beattie
Author of Mrs. Nixon
Born September 8, 1947

Our parents provided us with the essentials, then got on with their own lives. Which makes me realise that my parents were brilliant, not for what they did, but more for what they didn't do.
​Rachel Johnson
Author of Rake's Progress: My Political Midlife Crisis
Born September 3, 1965

The proper drinking of Scotch whisky is more than indulgence: it is a toast to civilization, a tribute to the continuity of culture, a manifesto of man's determination to use the resources of nature to refresh mind and body and enjoy to the full the senses with which he has been endowed.
​David Daiches
Author of Scotch Whisky: Its Past and Present
Born September 2, 1912

Anybody against women, against the ERA, should never be voted into office again.
​Liz Carpenter
Author of Unplanned Parenthood
Born September 1, 1920

Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
​George Packer
Author of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
Born August 13, 1960