PEN America

“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”—Marcel Proust

Born #OTD in 1965

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”—Fernando Pessoa

“The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of reeducation and regeneration that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front.” —Chinua Achebe

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."—Noam Chomsky 

"To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction."—Nawal El Saadawi

Born #OTD in 1984

Our 2014 PEN Ten interview with Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass, a memoir of a marriage over time.

"Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds."—Arundhati Roy

“What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.”—Elif Batuman

"I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression." —Amy Tan

"To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons."—Ma Jian

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."—Alice Walker 

“Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.”—Zadie Smith

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”—Toni Morrison

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”—S. G. Tallentyre

"I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done."—Ta-Nehisi Coates