Lev Grossman: “A good story is a dirty secret…”

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• Move the Goalposts or Remove Them Entirely
• The Truly Creative Mind
• It’s Justin time!
• Neil Armstrong (b. August 5th): “Science hasn’t yet mastered prophecy.”
• Wes Craven (b. August 2nd): “The first monster… is yourself.”
• THE DRACONIC BOWL is now available
• Geddy Lee (b. July 29): “I’m a big believer of daylight…”
• Marcel Duchamp (b. July 28): “I am forced to contradict myself…”
• “You have no refuge but writing.” ~ Tennessee Williams
• “The life of a writer is absolute hell” ~ Roald Dahl
• Arianna Huffington (b. July 15): “Most people no longer believe in an afterlife.”
• Robert Heinlein (b. July 7th): “Women and cats do as they please.”
• Dalai Lama (b. July 6th): “I don’t judge the universe.”
• Vincent D’Onofrio (b. June 30): “The search for the truth is not for the faint-hearted.”
• Gilda Radner (b. June 28): “Dreams are like paper, they tear so easily.”
• Duffy (b. June 23): “I think music is the only thing that I’ll ever really have.”
• Paul McCartney (b. June 18): “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”
• M.C. Escher (b. June 17): “I don’t use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.”
• W.B. Yeats (b. June 13): “Don’t wait till the iron is hot…”
• Anne Frank (b. June 12): “Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”
• Hugh Laurie (b. June 11): “You hope that your teenage self would like and forgive your 50-year-old self.”
• Johnny Depp (b. June 9th): “I don’t pretend to be Captain Weird.”
• Joan Rivers (b. June 8th): “I don’t bend over.”
• Prince (b. June 7th): “Money won’t buy happiness, but it’ll pay for the search.”
• Sandra Bernhard (b. June 6th): “When you’re constantly looking for things from other people, you’re not looking within yourself.”
• Cee Lo Green (b. May 30): “Loving something you’ve lost is all the incentive you need to love again.”
• Melissa Etheridge (b. May 29) “I’m so close to Heaven, this Hell cannot be mine.”
• Dashiell Hammett (b. May 27) “I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.”
• Mike Myers (b. May 25) “At any time the no-talent police will come and arrest me.”
• Fats Waller (b. May 21): “If you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it.”
• Timothy Olyphant (b. May 20): “I’m attracted to roles that are unpredictable…”
• Tina Fey (b. May 18): “A rectal thermometer’s the best way to take a baby’s temperature…”
• Megan Fox (b. May 16): “I’m so mentally ill, I could do something really interesting.”
• Barbara Kingsolver (b. April 8th): “I struggle with confidence, every time.”
• Eva Peron (b. May 7th): “One cannot accomplish anything without fanaticism.”
• George Clooney (b. May 6th): “I’m really white trash.”
• Tammy Wynette (b. May 5th): “It’s hard giving all your love to just one man.”
• Audrey Hepburn (b. May 4th): “I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.”
• James Brown (b. May 3rd): “The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.”
• David Beckham (b. May 2nd): “I always wanted to be a hairdresser.”
• Joseph Heller (b. May 1st): “A writer is only discovered once in a lifetime.”
• Annie Dillard (b. April 30): “Many writers do little but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”
• Jerry Seinfeld (b. April 29): “Bookstores are the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.”
• Jay Leno (b. April 28): “God owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.”
• Ian Rankin (b. April 28): “Most writers are just kids who refuse to grow up.”
• Mary Wollstonecraft (b. April 27): “It is vain to expect virtue from women until they are independent of men.”
• Coretta Scott King (b. April 27): “Women must become the soul of the nation.”
• Carol Burnett (b. April 26): “Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.”
• Anita Loos (b. April 26): “I love high style in low company.”
• Al Pacino (b. April 25): “I don’t need bodyguards. I’m from the South Bronx.”
• Barbra Streisand (b. April 24): “I’m simple, complex, lazy and driven.”
• Sue Grafton (b. April 24): “Ideas are easy. It’s their execution that separates the sheep from the goats.”
• William Shakespeare (b. April 23): “A fool thinks he’s wise, but a wise man knows he’s a fool.”
• Jack Nicholson (b. April 22): “I only take Viagra when I’m with more than one woman.”
• Vladimir Nabokov (b. April 22): “I think like a genius, speak like a child.”
• Alistair MacLean (b. April 21): “I’m not a born writer, and I don’t enjoy writing.”
• Joan Miro (b. April 20): “I try to apply colors like words that shape poems.”
• Sebastien Faulks (b. April 20): “Everything I know about structure I learned from classical music.”
• Jayne Mansfield (b. April 19): “Men are creatures with two legs and eight hands.”
• Conan O’Brien (b. April 18): “Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get.”
• Thornton Wilder (b. April 17): “An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.”
• Charlie Chaplin (b. April 16): “In the end, everything’s a gag.”
• Leonardo da Vinci (b. April 15): “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
• Bruce Sterling (b. April 14): “Embrace your nerditude.”
• Loretta Lynn (b. April 14): “I pray for answers to my problems.”
• Samuel Beckett (b. April 13): “We are all born mad.”
• Tom Clancy (b. April 12): “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
• David Letterman (b. April 12): “I can’t sing, dance or act.”
• Thomas Harris (b. April 11): “Fear comes with imagination…”
• Anton LaVey (b. April 11): “Satan has been the best friend the Church ever had.”
• Anne Lamott (b. April 10): “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.”
• Joseph Pulitzer (b. April 10): “The power to mold the future will be in the hands of journalists.”
• Hugh Hefner (b. April 9th): “Picasso had his blue period; I’m in my blonde period.”
• James Herbert (b. April 8th): “I’m not just in it for the gore.”
• Barbara Kingsolver (b. April 8th): “I struggle with confidence, every time.”
• Donald Barthelme (b. April 7th): “I’m interested in the ugly sentence that is also beautiful.”
• Billie Holiday (b. April 7th): “I’m always making a comeback…”
• Charles Jackson (b. April 6th): “The writer lives by biting the hand that feeds him.”
• Merle Haggard (b. April 6th): “I had more freedom on parole than in America right now.”
• Richard Peck (b. April 5th): “Nobody but a reader becomes a writer.”
• Bette Davis (b. April 5th): “A sure way to lose happiness…”
• Muddy Waters (b. April 4th): “I been in the blues all my life.”
• Marguerite Duras (b. April 4th): “Men like women who write.”
• Alec Baldwin (b. April 3rd): “Sex is like a Chinese dinner…”
• Marlon Brando (b. April 3rd): “Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse.”
• Reginald Hill (b. April 3rd): “You’re never alone with a novel. “
• Marvin Gaye (b. April 2nd): “Music, not sex, got me aroused.”
• Christopher Meloni (b. April 2nd): “I’m a nudist at heart…”
• Abraham Maslow (b. April 1st): “The story of the human race: men and women selling themselves short.”
• Otto von Bismarck (b. April 1st): “Laws are like sausages…”
• Angus Young (b. March 31): “When I’m on stage the savage in me is released.”
• Dr Cowgirl will join you soon. Please assume the position.
• Vincent Van Gogh ( b. March 30): “I put my heart into my work, and lost my mind.”
• Jo Nesbø (b. March 29): “It’s impossible to write anything without being political.”
• Pearl Bailey (b. March 29): “The worst of all frauds is to cheat one’s self.”
• Maxim Gorky (b. March 28): “Science is the intellect of the world, art its soul.”
• Lady Gaga (b. March 28): “I don’t see myself in terms of artifice.”
• Steven Tyler (b. March 26): “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.”
• Jim Parsons (b. March 24): “Intelligence is sexy until it becomes irritating…”
• Harry Houdini (b. March 24): “Don’t bite off red-hot iron unless you have a good set of teeth.”
• Jonathan Ames (b. March 23): “I don’t know what’s more difficult, life or the English language.”
• Erich Fromm (b. March 23): “We do not understand our dreams…”
• Joan Crawford (b. March 23): “I need sex for a clear complexion.”
• James Patterson (b. March 22): “If you want to write commercial fiction, it’s story, story, story…”
• William Shatner (b. March 22): “There’s an ecstasy about doing something on film.”
• Bruce Willis (b. March 19): “Too many children in foster care are falling through cracks.”
• Queen Latifah (b. March 18): “I don’t know how to be anyone else.”
• John Updike (b. March 18): “Writers dare to go it alone…”
• Billy Corgan (b. March 17): “I’m viewed as this weird, crippled character.”
• Jerry Lewis (b. March 16): “People hate me because I’m a genius.”
• David Cronenburg (b. March 15): “Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab.”
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. March 15): “Fight for the things that you care about.”
• Algernon Blackwood (b. March 14): “No man can describe to another the magic of the woman who ensnares him.”
• Michael Caine (b. March 14): “I feel a tremendous sadness for men…”
• William Macy (b. March 13): “I’m sure I have a process…”
• Adam Clayton (b. March 13): “I’m drawn to things that are sexy or aggressive.”
• Jack Kerouac (b. March 12): “Great things are not done by those who yield to trends.”
• Novels by Alan Annand: free to borrow on Amazon
• James Taylor (b. March 12): “We all have to face pain, and pain makes us grow.”
• Douglas Adams (b. March 11): “I love the whooshing sound of deadlines as they go by.”
• Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (b. March 10): “Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.”
• Mickey Spillane (b. March 9th): “Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle.”
• Bobby Fischer (b. March 9th): “I like the moment when I break a man’s ego.”
• Neil Postman (b. March 8th): “In Russia, writers with grievances are arrested; in America they go on TV talk shows where only their development is arrested.”
• Kat von D (b. March 8th): “I was born naked, waiting for life to write itself on my skin.”
• Bryan Cranston (b. March 7th): “Any one of us could become dangerous.”
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez (b. March 6th): “Literature is nothing but carpentry…”
• Shaquille O’Neal (b. March 6th): “I want to be known as The Big Shakespeare.”
• Andy Gibb (b. March 5th): “Girls are always running through my mind.”
• Khaled Hosseini (b. March 4th): “Literary fiction is kept alive by women…”
• Chaz Bono (b. March 4th): “Gender’s between your ears, not between your legs.”
• Jean Harlow (b. March 3rd): “I like to wake up each morning feeling a new man.”
• Jessica Biel (b. March 3rd): “I think I could drink my own blood…”
• Jon Bon Jovi (b. March 2nd): “Nothing is as important as passion…”
• John Irving (b. March 2nd): “You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”
• Lou Reed (b. March 2nd): “I don’t believe in dressing up reality.”
• Linus Pauling (b. February 28): “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”
• Brian Jones (b. February 28): “We piss anywhere, man.”
• John Steinbeck (b. February 27): “A journey is like a marriage.”
• Josh Groban (b. February 27): “Don’t try to be like me…”
• Elizabeth George (b. February 26): “I have to know the killer…”
• Victor Hugo (b. February 26): “Sorrow is a fruit…”
• Johnny Cash (b. February 26): “Success is worrying about everything except money.”
• George Harrison (b. February 25): “You’ve got as many lives as you like…”
• Steve Jobs (b. Feb 24): “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter.”
• Johnny Winter (b. February 23): “People need the blues.”
• Peter Fonda (b. February 23): “I don’t trust anybody who didn’t inhale.”
• Luis Bunuel (b. February 22): “I can only wait for the final amnesia…”
• Drew Barrymore (b. February 22): “Love is the hardest habit to break.”
• Ellen Page (b. February 21): “The relationships with my girl friends are so powerful…”