“I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,but just coming to the end of his triumph.”

Jack Gilbert

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that, looking back, I can hardly distinguish one from the other.”

Somerset Maugham

“It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don’t know much about goodness.”

Iris Murdoch

“The thing is not to follow a pattern… The thing is to accept your own life and not try to live someone else’s life.”

Katherine Anne Porter

“The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.”

Gore Vidal

“I try to write very fast. I don’t revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip.”

Billy Collins

“Know ye not that ye are gods?”

Hermes Trismegistos

“I’ve often felt that those times when you can work or make love with great energy occur when your best and worst motives are working in cooperation for once.”

Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art

“Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.”

Albert Einstein