Missing past issues of Mann’s Search for Meaning? You can find them all right here. Each issue features (1) a quote from a great writer, (2) some thoughts on what that quote means, and (3) a brief profile of that writer’s life and impact. (To download: option-click [Mac] or right-click [PC] on the month of the issue you want.)
2025
JUNE: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry “When you look up at the stars at night, since I’ll be living on one of them, since I’ll be laughing on one of them, for you it will be as if all the stars are laughing.”
MAY: Ray Bradbury “You must never think at the typewriter. You must feel.”
APRIL: Maurice Sendak “I promise! I swear! I won’t ever turn ten!”
MARCH: Michel de Montaigne “The trumpet’s voice rings out clearer and stronger for being forced through a narrow tube.”
FEBRUARY: John Barth “Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.”
JANUARY: Viktor Frankl “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life.”
2024
DECEMBER: Octavia E. Butler “Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.”
NOVEMBER: Gene Wolfe “You never learn how to write a novel. You only learn how to write the novel you’re on.”
OCTOBER: Maya Angelou “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
SEPTEMBER: E.L. Doctorow “Planning to write is not writing. Writing is writing.”
AUGUST: William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White “Omit needless words.”
JULY: Kurt Vonnegut “Practice any art … to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”
JUNE: Kate Atkinson “To be honest if I write one good sentence in a day that’s a success for me.”
MAY: Raymond Chandler “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.”
APR: James Baldwin “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
MAR: Lou Berney “There are times when it’s best to really think your way through it, and there are times when it’s best that you don’t know where you’re going.”
FEB: George Orwell “The rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job.”
JAN: Anne Lamott “Good writing is about telling the truth.”
2023
DEC: Robertson Davies“The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.”
NOV: Thomas Mann “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
OCT: Leslie Marmon Silko “Stories are all we have to fight off illness and death.”
SEP: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch “Murder your darlings.”
AUG: Jim Thompson “There is only one plot—things are not as they seem.”
JUL: Samuel Langhorne Clemens (aka Mark Twain) “Yesterday Mr. Hall wrote that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me, and I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.”
JUN: Madeleine L’Engle “I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.”
MAY: Rachel Carson “The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.”
MAR: James Patterson “If Sue ever leaves me, I’m going with her.”
FEB: Joan Didion “I write to find out what I think.”
JAN: Jack London “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
