"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
— Abraham Lincoln

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

"An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts."
— Albert Camus

"Still though, I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring."
— Dave Eggers

"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
— Orson Welles

"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

"Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious."
— Alan Moore

"Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads."
— Erica Jong

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no indifferent place.""
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses."
— Louis Aragon

"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.""
— William Faulkner

"If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both -- you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury

"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public. "
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"We all need to be mocked from time to time, lest we take ourselves too seriously."
— George R.R. Martin

"The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth."
— George R.R. Martin

"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
— Joseph Campbell

"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."
— Joseph Campbell

"The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are."
— Joseph Campbell

"Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world."
— Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces)

"Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward."
— Joseph Campbell

"I have always been a great dreamer. In dreams I have always been more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of my health and energy."
— Hermann Hesse

"Trance is fragile."
— Susan Cooper

"Fame has replaced the sea as the element of choice for adventure."
— Alan Moore

"Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance."
— Oscar Wilde

"I live in my dreams. Other people live in dreams too . . . just not their own."
— Hermann Hesse

"If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"In order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding. You have to do these things completely and purely without fear, without desire. Because things that we do without lust or result are the purest actions we shall ever take."
— Alan Moore

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza."
— Franza Kafka

"One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Heaven would indeed be heaven if lovers were there permitted as much enjoyment as they had experienced on earth."
— Giovanni Boccaccio

"We have art in order not to die of the truth. "
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!'"
— Lewis Carroll

"To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting."
— e.e. cummings

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them that everything be easy. And I don t think that s doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible imaginable scenario through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how uninterested we re becoming in all of this. I can remember Ray Harryhausen s animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. I can remember Willis O Brien s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because frankly I could have gotten someone a passerby on the street who could have gotten the same effect if you d given them half a million dollars to do it. It removes artistry and imagination and places money in the driver s seat and I think it s a pretty straight equation—that there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination. "
— Alan Moore

"When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety is gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end."
— Albert Camus

"Every man has within himself the entire human condition"
— Michel de Montaigne

"And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump."
— Michel de Montaigne

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)