Quote of the Day (Alice Munro, on the Constant Changes During Childhood)

“Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person. Generally it's in the fall, when you reenter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation. That's when you register the change most sharply. Afterwards you are not sure of the month or year but the changes go on, just the same. For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don't vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there's a switchback, what's been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done.”—Canadian Nobel Literature laureate Alice Munro, “Child's Play,” in Too Much Happiness: Stories (2009)

Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, on How He Became a Writer)

“The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.”— Russell Baker, Growing Up (1982)

The wry tone in this quote helped Russell Baker—born on this date 90 years ago in Morrisonville, Va. —win the Pulitzer Prize twice—not only in the biography category for the first volume of his memoirs, Growing Up, but also in 1979 in the commentary category, for his columns in The New York Times.

Baker’s stint with the Times occupied the bulk of his career (he joined its Washington bureau in 1954 and wrote his column from 1962 to 1998). Even in retirement, he has managed to stay busy, succeeding Alistair Cooke as host of Masterpiece Theatre from 1992 to 2004 and contributing the occasional piece to The New York Review of Books more recently.