Isaac Asimov

Source of image

Isaac Asimov
Born: January 2nd, 1920 - Petrovichi, Russia
Died: April 6th, 1992 - New York City, U.S.


novelist
short story writer
non-fiction writer


Any planet is 'Earth' to those that live on it.
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There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.
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Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don't see.
- Pebble in the Sky


The first problem of living is to minimize friction with the crowds that surround you on all sides.
- The Caves of Steel


You show me someone who can't understand people and I'll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself.
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It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.
- Foundation's Edge


Isn't it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us - and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run.
- The Secret of the Universe


You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates.
- I, Robot

Edward Stratemeyer...

Edward Stratemeyer
Born: October 4th, 1862 - New Jersey, U.S.
Died May 10th, 1930 - New Jersey, U.S.


writer
publisher


author and founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate,
which published more than eighty juvenile fiction series from a stable of ghostwriters
under a wealth of pseudonyms.
Sratemeyer himself wrote under a number of pseudonyms and provided plot outlines for the ghostwriters.


The juvemile series were mostly mystery stories and included;
Nancy Drew - pen-name Carolyn Keene
Hardy Boys - pen-name Frnklin W. Dixon
Bobbsey Twins - pen-name Laura Lee Hope
Rover Boys - pen-name Arthur W. Winfield

Gore Vidal...

Gore Vidal
Born: October 3rd, 1925 - New York, U.S.
Died: July 31st, 2012 - California, U.S.


novelist
playwright
essayist
non-fiction writer
screen-writer


Interesting fact: Vidal had bitter feuds with other authors, notably Truman Capote.
See HERE



We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.
- The City and the Pillar


Let the dust take me when the adventure's done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury.
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That my plans have lately gone somewhat awry is the sort of risk one must take if life is to be superb.
- Myra Breckinridge


How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself. 
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My memory plays me odd tricks these days [...] Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees, we die from the top.
- Julian


I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.
- Death Before Bedtime

In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death.
- Creation

Faith Baldwin...

Faith Baldwin  (wrote about 85 books - New York Times HERE)
Born: October 1st, 1893 - New York, U.S.
Died: March 18th, 1978 - Connecticut, U.S.


novelist
short story writer
poet
magazine articles

(special mentor to a child HERE)


All this makes me realize that miracles are everyday things. Not only the sudden, great good fortune, wafting in on a new wind from the sky. They are almost routine, yet miracles just the same.
- Seasons of the Heart

Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
- American Family

That coffee's strong enough to walk on.
- Give Love the Air

You could get to the bottom of her mind in one dive. And rarely, if ever, come up with a pearl.
- Something Special

Kissing tends to bring on woolgathering, even amnesia.
- One More Time


The plan of Nature is progress and for any progress mankind must pay a price.
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Life is rather like a long train ride; you may encounter a great many people, but looking out from your own small compartment of self you catch only a glimpse of other people's joy or despair.
- Evening Star


Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.
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Sometimes there is a greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence.
- Face Toward the Spring

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

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

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

Upton Sinclair...

Upton Sinclair
Born: September 20th, 1878 - Maryland, U.S.
Died: November 25th, 1968 - New Jersey, U.S.
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - 1943


novelist
journalist
political and social activist


The old wanderlust had gotten into his blood, the joy of the unbound life, the joy of seeking, of hoping without limit.
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The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the know-ledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.
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There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.
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They use everything about the hog except the squeal.
- The Jungle 


Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself.
- The Profits of Religion

Ken Kesey...

Ken Kesey
Born: September 17th, 1935 - Colorado, U.S.
Died: November 10th, 2001 - Oregon, U.S.


novelist
short story writer
children's story writer
essayist



Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.
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You get your visions through whatever gate you're granted.
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They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest


I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
- Tom Wolfe's record of Kesey quotes in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)


What I always wanted to be was a magician... My real upbringing when I was a teenager was doing magic shows, all over the state, with my father and brothers. Doing magic, you not only have to be able to do a trick, you have to have a little story line to go with it. And writing is essentially a trick.
- interview in The Sun Times (South Africa) - 29 August 1999

Mary Oliver...

Mary Oliver
Born: September 10, 1935 - Ohio, U.S.


poet (Pulitzer Prize for poetry)


When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

 I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.


Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
 to be blessed.
- Evidence: Poems

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
 It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
- Thirst 

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
- A Poetry Handbook

Marilyn Durham...

Marilyn Durham
Born: September 8th, 1930 - Indiana, U.S.
Died: March 19th, 2015 - Indiana, U.S.


novelist


He wanted to be a leader like his father. He ended up being an imitation white man.  
- The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing - pub. 1972 + a film 1973
- quote is from the film version

On matters of fact I may give him opinions, but on matters of his opinions I hold my tongue.
- Flambard's Confession

Justin (Joe) Kaplan...

Justin Kaplan
Born: September 5th, 1925 - NY, U.S.
Died: March 2nd, 2014 - Massachusetts, U.S.


biographer
- Mr Clemens and Mark Twain (1967) - Pulitzer Prize


Television, despite its enormous presence, turns out to have added pitifully few lines to the communal memory.

There ought to be something about computers and artificial intelligence. Surely somebody somewhere said something memorable.
- when general editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations - 1993 (16th edition)

For years I assumed the shape of a literary biography must imitate the shape of the subject’s life. Then I realized it was more significant to recreate the life’s density, texture, and meaning. 
- 1981 Boston Globe interview - see HERE

I really feel there’s a vaguely religious aspect to biography. Especially with creative people, you’re dealing with sort of a mystery.
- in an interview with Rob Couteau, Kaplan talks about his biography of Walt Whitman

Eugene Field...

Eugene Field
Born: September 2nd, 1850 - Missouri, U.S.
Died: November 4, 1895 - Illinois, U.S.


children's poetry
humorous essays
newspaper columnist




Wynkin', Blynkin', and Nod, one night sailed off in a wooden shoe;
Sailed off on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going and what do you wish?" the old moon asked the three.
"We've come to fish for the herring fish that live in this beautiful sea.
Nets of silver and gold have we," said Wynkin', Blynkin', and Nod.
- Wynken, Blynken and Nod


No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.
- The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac

C.S. Forester...

C.S. Forester
Born: August 27, 1899 - Cairo, Egypt
Died: April 2, 1966 - California, U.S.

novelist


When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.
- The African Queen

Hornblower worked as hard to conceal his human weaknesses as some men worked to conceal ignoble birth.
- Lieutenant Hornblower

Christopher Isherwood...

Christopher Isherwood
Born: August 26, 1904 - UK
Died: January 4, 1986 - US
novelist
playwright
screen-writer
autobiographer
diarist


One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself. 

If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.
 ― A Single Man 

We live in stirring times-  tea-stirring times. 

I have had an unpleasant feeling, such as one has in a dream, that I myself do not exist.
 ―  Goodbye to Berlin