"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."
— Ayn Rand

"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"
— Douglas Adams

"I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me."
— David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)

"We burn daylight."
— William Shakespeare

"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."
— John Lennon

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
— Albert Camus

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
— Albert Camus

"Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre."
— Albert Camus

"It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners."
— Albert Camus

"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

"I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot."
— Steve Martin

"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

""There are two ways to look at life. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don't realize it." "
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, And Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century)

"THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."
— Lewis Carroll

"He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt."
— Joseph Heller (Catch-22)

"where are the snowdens of yesteryear?"
— Joseph Heller (Catch-22)

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

"I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God."
— Orson Welles

"...And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people."
— Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity!)

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

"(When asked to use "horticulture" in a sentence) You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."
— Dorothy Parker (The Portable Dorothy Parker)

"If I didn't care for fun and such,
I'd probably amount to much.
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn."
— Dorothy Parker

"I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true."
— Dorothy Parker

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

"There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true."
— Niels Bohr

"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough."
— Niels Bohr

"“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” "
— Niels Bohr

"There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them."
— Niels Bohr

"No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical."
— Niels Bohr

"If you've got a dollar and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've got 71 cents left; But if you've got seventeen grand and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've still got seventeen grand. There's a math lesson for you."
— Steve Martin

"Writers block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol."
— Steve Martin

"I've heard lots of people lie to themselves but they never fool anyone."
— Steve Martin

"Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration."
— Steve Martin

"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
— David Foster Wallace

"Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."
— David Foster Wallace

"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated."
— David Foster Wallace

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."
— David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)

"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question."
— Albert Camus (The Fall)

"Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours."
— Hermann Hesse

"I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me."
— Hermann Hesse

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."
— Hermann Hesse