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“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

Jack London

“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Carl Sagan

“There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.”

Andrew Jackson (1767-1845)

“Our culture lies. They say they want to encourage and reward individuality and creativity, but in practice they try to hammer down the pointy parts, and shame off the different parts.”

Sandra Dodd

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

William Strunk Jr., Introduction to The Elements of Style

“Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.”

Arthur Rubinstein

“What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“The main evidence in favour of a life doing nothing but write & nose into other folk’s affairs only in so far as you need exercise, is that your dreams become long & coherent & beautiful.”

Ted Hughes

“I’m not fatalistic. Bank tellers are fatalistic; clerks are fatalistic. I’m a farmer. Who ever heard of a fatalistic farmer? I’m not fatalistic. I smoke a lot of cigarettes, but that doesn’t make me fatalistic.”

Bob Dylan Interview with Playboy 1966

“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.”

Vladimir Nabakov