"The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again."
— Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone)

"I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them."
— Jonathan Franzen (Strong Motion)

"Pirates could happen to anyone."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face."
— Michel Foucault

"Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter, try again, fail again, fail better."
— Samuel Beckett

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

"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 that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
— Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky)

"Poetry is an abstraction bloodied."
— Wallace Stevens

"It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love."
— Raymond Carver

"It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power."
— Raymond Carver

"Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications."
— Raymond Carver

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

"The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking."
— Albert Einstein

"Resist much. Obey little."
— Walt Whitman

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself."
— Robert Frost

"Do you hate people?

I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around."
— Charles Bukowski (The Movie: Barfly)

"Live to the point of tears."
— Albert Camus