A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree.
​Gretel Ehrlich
Author of This Cold Heaven:
​Seven Seasons in Greenland
Born January 21, 1946

All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.
​Robert Olen Butler
Author of Perfume River 
Born January 20, 1945

I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.
​Patricia Highsmith
Author of The Talented Mr. Ripley
Born January 19, 1921

Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last.
​Maureen Dowd
Author of The Year of Voting Dangerously
Born January 14, 1952

The one thing that is sort of sneered at and not really believed is bisexuality. Any bisexual man is just seen as a closeted gay man. That shows how narrow-minded people are. The other thing that's totally neglected and which nobody approves of is celibacy. People again assume that you're just repressing something.
​Edmund White
Author of The Beautiful Room Is Empty
Born January 13, 1940

It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
​Edmund Burke
Author of Reflections on the French Revolution
Born January 12, 1729

It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.
​Joyce Maynard
Author of The Best of Us: A Memoir
Born November 5, 1953

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.
​Martin Cruz Smith
Author of Gorky Park
Born November 3, 1942

GPS works great. I recommend it for all cat owners who want to know what their cats do when they're not there, if you can stand the ridicule from your friends.
​Caroline Paul
Author of Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology
Born October 29, 1963

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
​Evelyn Waugh
Author of Brideshead Revisited
Born on October 28, 1903

If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey.
​A. N. Wilson
Author of The Mystery of Charles Dickens
Born October 27, 1950

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