There’s something strangely inspiring about photographs of visionaries in the same room — we don’t know quite what it is, but the idea of (what we imagine to be) a profound meeting of minds captured on film always manages to get us excited. To that end, we put together a collection of some very excellent photographs of awesome musicians hanging out together a couple of months ago, but it’s not just musical types who like to gather in inspiring combinations. Writers, it seems, also enjoy each other’s company (whatever they might say to the contrary). Click through to see our photo roundup of writers hanging out with other writers, with a hat tip to the wonderful Tumblr Awesome People Hanging Out Together for inspiration and a few of the shots.

Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence, 1928. [Image via]

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paris, 1925. [Image via]

William S. Burroughs and Norman Mailer. [Image via]

Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. [Image via]

Tom Wolfe and Kurt Vonnegut. [Image via]

Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes. [Image via]

Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams. [Image via]

Roald Dahl and Ernest Hemingway, London, 1944. [Image via]

Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan, and Mark Twain. [Image via]

Amy Tan and Stephen King on stage as the Rock Bottom Remainders. [Image via]

Maya Angelou and James Baldwin, 1960s. [Image via]

Martin and Kingsley Amis, London, 1979. Photo by Dmitri Kasterine.

David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen at the book launch for Infinite Jest, 1996. Photo by Marina Garnier. [via]

Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, 1944. [Image via]

Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. [Image via]

Patti Smith and William S. Burroughs. [Image via]

Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson (and Neil Armstrong!). [Image via]

Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, 1933. [Image via]

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. [Image via]

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. [Image via]

Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt. [Image via]

Truman Capote and Harper Lee. [Image via]

Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. [Image via]

Henry James and Edith Wharton, 1904. [Image via]

Ian Mc Ewan, Christopher Hitchens, and Martin Amis, Uruguay. [Image via]