Truman Capote...

Truman Capote
Born: September 30th, 1924 - Louisianna, U.S.
Died: August 25th, 1984 - California, U.S.


novelist
short story writer
playwright
non-fiction writer


It’s better to look at the sky than live there.
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Never love a wild thing...If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.
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Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.
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Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.
- Breakfast at Tiffany's


It is no shame to have a dirty face- the shame comes when you keep it dirty.
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Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.
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Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.
- In Cold Blood


There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink.
- The Muses Are Heard


Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master's wrist.
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Oh, I adore to cook. It makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.
- Summer Crossing


It's bad enough in life to do without something YOU want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want THEM to have.
- A Christmas Memory 

We all, sometimes, leave each other there under the skies, and we never understand why.
- Music for Chameleons

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra...

Miguel de Cervantes
Born: September 29th, 1547 - Alcara de Hanares, Spain
Died: April 22nd, 1616 - Madrid, Spain


novelist
poet
playwright


The venerable old Don, despite all his human flaws and follies, possessed a nobility of purpose that redeemed the limitations of his powers. Spain honored him, loved him, and forgave him.
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Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.
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Laughter distances us from that which is ugly and therefore potentially distressing, and indeed enables us to obtain paradoxical pleasure and therapeutic benefit from it.
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Time has more power to undo and change things than the human will.
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It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.
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Where there's music there can be no evil.
- The Life and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha 



NOTE
2016 has been named ''Year of Shakespeare and Cervantes''.
Both died 400 years ago in April, almost on the same day. (Shakespeare - April 23)

Kate Douglas Wiggin...

Kate Douglas Wiggin
Born: September 28th, 1856 - Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died: August 24th, 1923 - London, U.K.


novelist
children's story writer


To let blessed babies go dangling and dawdling without names, for months and months, was enough to ruin them for life.
- The Bird's Christmas Carol

No whimpering, madam! You can't have the joys of motherhood without some of its pangs! Think of your blessings, and don't be a coward!—
- Mother Carey's Chickens

Lord, I do not ask that Thou shouldst give me wealth; only show me where it is, and I will attend to the rest.
- Penelope's Progress


There are certain narrow, umimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous and sometimes the worst traits in children.
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Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World,
With the wonderful water round you curled,
And the wonderful grass upon your breast,
World, you are beautifully drest!
- Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm


There is a kind of magicness about going far away and then coming back all changed.
- New Chronicles of Rebecca


If I haven't anything to write, I am just as anxious to 'take my pen in hand' as though I had a message to deliver, a cause to plead, or a problem to unfold. Nothing but writing rests me; only then do I seem completely myself! 
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Pictures made in childhood are painted in bright hues.
- My Garden of Memory

Josef Škvorecký...

Josef Škvorecký
Born: September 27th, 1924 - Nachod, Czech Republic
Died: Janurary 3rd, 2012 - Toronto, Canada


novelist
poet
essayist
non-fiction writer


Regarded as a Czech-Canadian writer
I am a Czech and I am a loyal citizen of Canada, he told an interviewer in 2006.
(Ref  NYT HERE)


We may think we live for wisdom, but in fact we're living for the the pleasure wisdom brings us.
- The Engineer of Human Souls

After sixty years of the Soviet state’s struggle against art, it should be obvious that Marxists in power do not trouble themselves about aesthetics.
- Hipness at Noon


There’s this tradition in Czech literature that books are sacred, and therefore the language used in writing books is very formal—without contractions, distortions, or slang...
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Hemingway. I suddenly saw that you could write dialogue as people spoke it. But I didn’t read Hemingway until the end of the war in an English-language Swedish edition of A Farewell to Arms. And then I read everything. It opened my eyes. I realized that you could write dialogue that need not be informational; it simply was.
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If you live in a country where politics are oppressive and you write—or try to write—you can’t avoid being a political writer. I enjoy writing about other things, but to write a novel about Bohemia in the past forty years and avoid politics entirely would be to write some sort of romantic idyll that never existed. I consider myself a realistic writer; it’s unfortunate that one becomes a political writer out of necessity.
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Every writer writes, first of all, for himself. I think my primary readership consists of intelligent exiles because I write about Czechs not only in Czechoslovakia, but also in North America as in my new novel, about the role of Czechs during the Civil War. But I believe that if something has relevance for people of my own nation, then it probably has relevance for everybody, and that there’s something universal about it. The accidentals may be different, but the basics are the same, and they’re universal.
- Paris Review Interview - 1989 - but interview actually conducted 1985

T.S. Eliot...

T.S. Eliot
Born: September 26th, 1888 - Missouri, U.S.
Died; January 4th, 1965 - London, U.K.

He became a British citizen in 1927

Nobel Prize in Literature - 1948

poet
essayist
playwright


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
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For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock


We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.
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This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
- The Hollow Men


A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
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And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
I will show you fear in a handful of dust
- The Waste Land


Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take,
towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.
- Four Quartets

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity, 
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity. 
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare: 
At whatever time the deed took place - MACAVITY WASN'T THERE!
- Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats


The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
- Murder in the Cathedral

William Faulkner...

William Faulkner
Born: September 25th, 1897 - Mississippi, U.S.
Died: July 6th, 1962 - Mississippi, U.S.


novelist
short story writer
playwright
poet
essayist


Nobel Prize for Literature 1949
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1955, 1963



Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
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And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
- The Sound and the Fury


I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
- As I Lay Dying

She was the captain of her soul...
- Light in August

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
- A Fable

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief
- The Wild Palms

...no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.
- Intruder in the Dust

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
- Absalom, Absalom!

F. Scott Fitzgerald...

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Born: September 24th, 1896 - Minnesota, U.S.
Died: December 21st, 1940 - California, U.S.


novelist
short story writer


In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
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I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.
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So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.
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The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.
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A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.
- The Great Gatsby

All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase--"I love you."
- The Offshore Pirate

Receding from grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.
- Tender is the Night

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
- The Crack-Up

I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation — with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals.
- This Side of Paradise

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
- The Diamond as Big as the Ritz