"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager."
— Susan Sontag

"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me."
— T.S. Eliot

"Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force."
— Antonin Artaud (The Theater and Its Double)

"To acquire knowledge, one must study;
but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."
— Marilyn Vos Savant

"We kings do develop a certain ability to recognize objects under our noses."
— Robin McKinley (The Hero and the Crown)

"I sometimes think my head is so large because it is so full of dreams."
— Joseph Merrick (How to write mysteries: A writer's notebook)

"In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
— C.S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man)

"Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details."
— Arthur Conan Doyle (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes)

"Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.
"
— Bergen Evans.

"To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees."
— Paul Valéry

"The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon"
— Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

"A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor - it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it."
— George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London)

"Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. "
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe."
— Michael Connelly (Trunk Music)

"To Generalize is to be an Idiot;
To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit."
— William Blake

"Not a single object seems to possess a practical use. The antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a barn, It is exactly the same sort of sensation I get when I enter the Comedie-Francaise or the Palaise- Royal Theatre; ; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in armor, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass cases. Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it's like finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there's no room in the valise."
— Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"...I think apparatus burned out all over the ward trying to adjust to her come busting in like she did-took electronic readings on her and calculated they weren't built to handle something like this on the ward, and just burned out, like machines committing suicide."
— Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

"I perceive that I am neither a planter of the backwoods, pioneer, nor settler there, but an inhabitant of the Mind, and given to friendship and ideas. The ancient society, the Old England of New England, Massachusetts for me."
— Amos Bronson Alcott

"There was an omnivorous intellect that won him the family sobriquet of Walking Encyclopedia."
— Eric Liu