"People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations"
— Graham Greene

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
— Henry James

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
— Herman Melville

"Surrender to a logic more powerful than reason. "
— J.G. Ballard

"Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire."
— J.G. Ballard

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. "
— Philip K. Dick

"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."
— Evelyn Waugh

"In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."
— Mark Twain

"The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
— William Gibson

"I spit on metaphysics."
— Edward James Olmos Extreme

"I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen."
— J.G. Ballard

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."
— Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses)

"Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
— Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky)