"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde

"The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?"
— Gilles Deleuze (Mille Plateaux)

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come"
— Gilles Deleuze

"Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Moon And Sixpence)

"There are books so alive that you're always afraid that
while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed,
has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too,
and like a river moved on and moved away.
No one has stepped twice into the same river.
But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?"
— Marina Tsvetaeva

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."
— William Faulkner

"True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin)

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are all going to die, an expression of intensity is justified."
— C.D. Wright (Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil)

"The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out."
— Georges Bataille (Theory of Religion)

"All books are merely delayed dust."
— George Elliott Clarke

"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes."
— Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus