"I could read Poe's prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death." Mark Twain, on Jane Austin's writing skills (with thanks to Robyn Conley)

"I'm dedicated to filling up this notebook even if my prose limps to the finish line with a broken leg and all the spectators have gone home." Jay Zalinger, in Notes to My Dead Therapist, a work in progress

"When you start living your life to please others, you most likely won't be very happy. It's hard to pretend, Devon. Never forget that. Pretending is like dying. Pretending is worse than dying. Live your life pretending and you're skirting your tomorrows away." Grandpa Fitzgerald in "Oceans of Tomorrow (The Perfect Life)" from Experiments of Imagination, a novel by G. M. Glenn

"The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business." John Steinbeck

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." Mark Twain

"...the vicissitudes of the world cause me to choose between depression and cynicism. I choose the more entertaining." Marcel in Paris, Wyoming, a novel by Jim James

"...you are single and can be as happy as you can. In marriage, you can only be as happy as the least miserable of the two." Marcel in Paris, Wyoming, a novel by Jim James

"...there are many questions I can't answer so I ask them. As I said, it's my pathetic contribution to epistemology." Marcel in Paris, Wyoming, a novel by Jim James

"I accept that my God is not all powerful or even all good. This way, I don't have to excuse why innocent men and women and little babies die at the hands of evil people. I choose my necessary fictions with some intelligence. ...a wise man chooses his necessary fictions carefully because, if he is honorable, he will be held to live by them." Marcel in Paris, Wyoming, a novel by Jim James

"...gender ambiguity is my idea of a good time." F. J. Bergmann, a poet

"Marines do not sleep. They wait." Anonymous

"In a few days, the northwest rains would cut loose, and the reins of charity would stretch tight. ...one morning, hung-over and ailing, the local transient made a decision. He ate a hot breakfast, bathed and shaved, securely tied-off his cart, and stepped in front of an eastbound train." Brad Hardy in "The Jeweler and the Door", a short story

"What makes capable citizens out of little mush heads is the teaching of academic fundamentals and social ethics ... instead of feeding them politically polished concepts that are intended to lead to programmed conclusions." Paul G. Schreiber in American by Choice, a memoir of Hitler's Germany

"...a volcanic-like upheaval broke over us. Explosions followed one another in unending, split-second successions. Our shelter walls performed a dance, leaping several inches inward with each explosion, and then retreating spontaneously to their starting point. Each time they left behind an image of themselves, a chalky shroud that slowly drifted to the ground but never managed to settle before the next explosion drove the wall back into that same dusty frame." Paul G. Schreiber in American by Choice, a memoir of Hitler's Germany

"Whatever form political correctness takes, it is intended to channel thought and behavior according to someone else's agenda, and invariably it emanates from an elitist faction. ... The sign that real power has passed to the elitist group is when the practice of political correctness becomes the norm. When the traditionalists in a society can be maligned without raising a public outcry, they have been marginalized as a political power." Paul G. Schreiber in American by Choice, a memoir of Hitler's Germany

"Where Liz's name should have been there is a space; her name must be part of the jumble of white letters and dust sitting on the metal lip of the bulletin board." Carol Wobig in "Ashes", a short story

"Mommy promised Brittaney that everything was going to be fine. That's what everyone said. It was just the thing to say when nothing was fine. When everything was so wrong that nothing could make it better, that was when people said 'There, there' and 'Don't worry' and 'Everything is okay' and 'Everything is going to be fine.'" Eric D. Goodman in Once a Playground, a novel

"Santa Claus cried and Brittaney knew it was because he could not bring back Daddy. And then, Brittaney cried harder than before. She cried loud, so loud that her crying filled the store. Tears streamed down her face, sharp icicles melting the moisture of understanding." Eric D. Goodman in Once a Playground, a novel

"Tears flowed and then dried, leaving nothing but empty crust, no filling. It washes away the moisture of understanding. " Eric D. Goodman in Once a Playground, a novel

"She looked at the clock as the second hand succumbed to gravity. The sound was off, the station sold, the bluesman retired. It was long past keeping good times." Michael Agostino in "Clock Radio", a short story

"The radio was the size of a toaster oven, with a speaker on the left, a clock on the right and the stations stacked in the middle like a thermometer." Michael Agostino in "Clock Radio", a short story

"The passing minutes dragged the silence about the room." Charles Schwarz in "Death of an Angry Letter Writer", a short story

"... long enough for the eye to notice, but short enough for the mind to doubt the eye." Charles Schwarz in "The Mysogynist and the Sand Bunnies Murder Mystery", a short story

"Fog unrolled like strips of gauze just outside the windows." Joan Fox in Extended Family, a novel

"... sleep was a restless phantom, disintegrating into shadow the moment he reached for it." Daniel Wimberly in Flowers on Golgotha, a novel

"... he spotted his dagger across the room, wrapped in the lazy grip of a shadow." Daniel Wimberly in Flowers on Golgotha, a novel

"Passion always suffers the consequences of someone else's perspective." Michael Agostino in "Letters from Mac," a short story

"A spider of unease crawled along my spine." Neil Ostroff in Road Rage, a novel

"Expecting life to treat you fairly because you're a good person is like expecting a shark not to eat you because you personally don't eat seafood." Neil Ostroff in Road Rage, a novel

"I wanted to unzip my skin, like the sleeping bag rolled up in the back of my Suvee, and just crawl out.... All the while, I cried quietly, letting the tears flow... down the contours of my jaw and neck to dry somewhere near my heart." Antonia, in Rosetta Stones, a novel by Cathy Dix

"I knew it was just the gods having a midnight bowling match, smoking stogies made of creosote that perfumed the air and made me dizzy with elation." Madrid, in Rosetta Stones, a novel by Cathy Dix

"I'm sure I don't have to tell most of you what a beautiful place the Gila is, surrounded with mystery hiding not only in the walls of the cliff dwellings, but in the whisper of secrets kept in the trees and the soil, the river and the wildlife." Javen, reading Joey's speech, in Rosetta Stones, a novel by Cathy Dix

"They were stiff brown people crafted with sharp scissors into an endless paper chain . . . . And the mass had a slurping maw, terrifying in its faceless skin, pulsing and shivering around, crushing invisible gears that ground up the little brown men." Paul Schreiber in American by Choice: From WWII Ashes to Celebration of Principle, a memoir

"Pouring your heart into your writing does not guarantee the reader will hear your heartbeat." Anonymous

"I'm beginning to realize what Keats, Poe, Hemingway et al eventually learned: it isn't that true poets and writers are necessarily 'tragic figures'; rather, it's that the poet or writer is never more important than the work and whatever it takes to drag the words kicking and screaming from the literary womb. The continued realization of one's own lack of worth is a burden that increases exponentially with greater achievements." Anonymous

"There is a minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class." George Orwell

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." Voltaire

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." Howard Aiken

"In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story." Ben Bova

"It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while." Luther Burbank

"The selfish trouble is that I myself have had to put up with these seriously annoying faults for so long that I've almost come to think other people can bear them. I am the one who wakes up nearest to myself, and the continual horror that comes from the realization of this individuality has made me almost to believe that the reactions of others to my horrible self are small enough, in comparison." Dylan Thomas

"I do not see a delegation for the Four Footed. I see no seat for the Eagles. We forget and we consider ourselves superior, but we are, after all, a mere part of Creation. We must consider to understand where we are, and we stand somewhere between the mountain and the ant." Chief Oren Lyons

"Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start." Ernest Hemingway

"Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things: the honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist." Robert Browning

"The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story." John LeCarre

"To give off light, one must endure burning." Viktor Frankl

"Blessed are the cracked, for they let the light through." Spike Milligan

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows, that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention." George Orwell

"It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way." Ernest Hemingway

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." George Bernard Shaw

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." E. B. White

"I think that in order to write convincingly, one must he somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, faultfinding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice --- they all make fine fuel." Edna Ferber

"I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains ... why a bird sustains itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena engaged my thought throughout my life." Leonardo da Vinci

"It was proof that he lived on. That the hurt had been incorporated into his skin or his spine (making him a trace shorter) or his knees (making him wobbly at times) or the joints of his fingers (making him think he was arthritic). That who he was now was fuller, more empathetic (knowing, in a keen sense, what one beautiful woman can inflict on an aesthetically driven man), and therefore, more thankful for that feeling of connection to a woman when it came again." Sarah Doyle in Blindspots

"There were so many secrets within a person, expectant moments followed by stillborn disappointment, passion wrapped up in a caplet, swallowed deep with honey, stuck in the back of the longest, sorest throat, drowned in tears only the carpet in her closet and the tiles in her shower knew." Sarah Doyle in Blindspots

"Oh, let a man of spirit venture where he pleases
And never tip his golden cup empty towards the moon!
Since heaven gave the talent, let it be employed."
Li Po

"Kipling believed that the author's intent is the least important aspect. What is important is that the author create his work. The later interpretation of it has nothing to do with him, being entirely in the hands of the reader." Jorge Luis Borges

"Imagine a piece of matter and yourself inside it, yourself, aware, thinking and therefore knowing you exist, able to move that piece of matter that you're in, to make it sleep or wake, make love or walk uphill." Fredric Brown

"Prose is telling stories around the campfire; Poetry is telling stories in the campfire." Jack Grapes

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

"Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius." George Bernard Shaw

"Selfish writers leave you with the memory of their book. Generous writers leave you with the memory of the world they evoked." Arundhati Roy

"Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we pound out tunes fit to make bears dance, when what we want is to win over the stars." Gustave Flaubert

"I only write when I'm inspired, so I see to it that I'm inspired every morning at nine o'clock." Peter De Vries

"Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a [human] behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer." Gertrude Stein

"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." Lillian Hellman

"I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell something I only feel in my bones and which can only be explained in these bones. Basically, if it is nothing other than this fear we have often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear paralyzing, fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear, but also a longing for something, that is greater than all that is fearful." Franz Kafka

"My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water." Mark Twain

"Inspiration far more often comes during the work than before it . . . ." Madeleine L'Engle

"If the artist works only when she feels like it, she's not apt to build up much of a body of work. Inspiration far more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of the artist is to listen to the work, and to go where it tells her to go. Ultimately, when you are writing, you stop thinking and write what you hear." Madeleine L'Engle

"I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories." Washington Irving

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." Philip K. Dick

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence, University education." George Bernard Shaw

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Thomas Mann

"Evil has every advantage but one: it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil --- hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring --- but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot imagine any motives except lust for domination and fear so that, when he has learned that his enemies have the Ring, the thought that they might try to destroy it never enters his head, and his eye is kept toward Gondor and away from Mordor and the Mount of Doom." W. H. Auden in the New York Times, January 1956, reviewing Tolkien's masterpiece

"Delay is natural to the writer. He is like a surfer: he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? Of courage?) that will carry him along. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor, as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper." E. B. White

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." Albert Einstein

"The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him." Rachel Carson

"The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts . . . something stood still in my soul." D.H. Lawrence

"Poetry is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals." Sylvia Plath

"A writer strives to express a universal truth in the best possible way that he can: in the way that rings most bells in the shortest amount of time. He knows that he can't live forever and that each work might be his last and also that the next time he may succeed in achieving his goal. It is almost like trying to write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin. It is an attempt to reduce all of the emotional capacities of the human heart into one phrase." William Faulkner

"For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word." Catherine Drinker Bowen

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward." Lewis Carroll

"All literature implies moral standards and criticisms, the less explicit the better." Evelyn Waugh

"Any man who will look into his heart and honestly write what he sees there, will find plenty of readers." Ed Howe

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it." Groucho Marx

"We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective." Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Each book purchased for motion pictures has some individual quality, good or bad, that has made it remarkable. It is the work of a great array of highly paid and incompatible writers to distinguish this quality, separate it, and obliterate it." Evelyn Waugh

"There is a busy body on your staff who devotes a lot of his time to chasing split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman splits his infinitive when the sense demands it. I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no consequence whether he decides to go quickly or to quickly go. The important thing is that he should go at once." Bernard Shaw in a letter to The London Times

"Writers have two main problems. One is writer's block, when the words won't come at all and the other is logorrhea, when the words come so fast that they can hardly get to the wastebasket in time." Cecilia Bartholomew

"The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor,' I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'" Roy Blount Jr.

"A writer has got to be a cynic. You've got to look at life clearly. No rose-colored glasses. The human race is not very admirable. It was a big mistake of God's...I think I appeal to readers because there's nothing false or hypocritical in what I write. And they recognize themselves, they recognize their fears. And they know what bastards they are." Taylor Caldwell

"No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted." W. H. Auden

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." George Orwell

"Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it." Russel Lynes

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae." Kurt Vonnegut

"The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them." Raymond Chandler

"Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none." Jules Renard

"For the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid." Edgar Allan Poe

"Creative minds have been known to survive any kind of bad training." Anna Freud

"To those who think, life is a comedy; to those who feel, it is a tragedy." Hugh Walpole

"Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists." Eudora Welty

"There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature." Lawrence Durrell

"For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word." Catherine Drinker Bowen

"To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world." Salman Rushdie

"I like to go off to the side where I belong. How can you observe the vagaries of human behavior if you're the target?" Jim Harrison in Off To The Side

"What we want is a story that starts with an earthquake and builds to a climax." Samuel Goldwyn

"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing." Sylvia Plath

"To be able to write a play a [person] must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate . . . something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool." Robert E. Sherwood

"Trust your demon." Roger Zelazny

"The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable." Nadine Gordimer

"The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial." Virginia Woolf

"Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature." Jean Cocteau

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little." Edmund Burke

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." Oscar Wilde

"Hay fever time. The sexual life of palm trees makes me weep." Salam Pax

"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." James Thurber

"Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops." H. L. Mencken

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." Mark Twain

"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own." Jonathan Swift

"Youth, lacking the ballast of experience, can see a thread and sew a coat out of the material of their imagination." Charles Schwarz in "The Onion Mystery," a short story

"We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights." Pearl Buck

"Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is." Oscar Wilde

"If one cannot accept failure and scorn, how is he to make his art? It's like wanting to go to heaven without dying." Russell Edson

"What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers." Logan Pearsall Smith

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." Douglas Adams

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." H.G. Wells

"No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind." Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

"There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft." Jessamyn West

"If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing." John D. MacDonald

"Somehow poets nowadays believe it's okay to just chronicle their own experiences, spew their take on them, and publish them in prosy notes posing as poetry, experiences they believe are compelling to someone other than their mothers. Someone has to say that writing poetry is not group therapy, but a pursuit by artists shaking the universe to see if some Truth falls out." John Griffiths

"Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing." Fannie Hurst

"The adjective is the enemy of the noun." Voltaire

"The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention." Flannery O'Connor

"Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music." H. L. Mencken

"People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy --- and I keep it in a jar on my desk." Stephen King

"No man ever will unfold the capacities of is own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude." Thomas DeQuincey

"The art of poetry demands either an inspired person, or a man of genius; for the former is easily lifted out of himself, while the latter readily takes on various feelings and moods." Aristotle, Poetics

"The world breaks everyone, but some are stronger at the broken places." Ernest Hemingway

"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it." Chinese Proverb

"Writing is simply the writer and the reader on opposite ends of a pencil; they should be as close together as that." Jay R. Gould

"Dad said he'd made it all the way to high school thinking girls were just soft boys." Gary Marchal in Frenching Violet

"I don't like to use words that are too harsh in describing people. I don't like to. But the landlady is a fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage." Edward Albee, "The Zoo Story"

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. And always be ready for the resulting adventures." Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

"Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer, and if so, why?" Bennett Cerf

"Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes; Art is knowing which ones to keep." Scott Adams

"Boredom in any event usually says more about the person bored than about the thing he is bored by." Norman Podhoretz

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work." Emile Zola

"Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober." James Thurber

"Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking." Black Elk

"Anybody can have ideas --- the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph." Mark Twain

"A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender." Jim Bishop

"A definition is the enclosing of a wilderness of idea within a wall of words." Samuel Butler

"As a general rule of writing, anything that goes without saying should not be said." W. W. Watt in "An American Rhetoric"

"Things happen before one can give them a name." Carlos Fuentes

"The twisted circumstances under which we live is grist for the writing mill, the loving, hating and discovering, finding new handles for old pitchers...." Alice Childress

"The only people who should use the possessive we are kings, newspaper editors, and persons with tapeworms." Mark Twain

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song." Maya Angelou

"A freelance writer is one who is paid per piece or per word or per haps." Robert Benchley

"All the information you need can be given in dialogue." Elmore Leonard

"The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak." Frederich Nietzsche

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous." Robert Benchley

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use." Ernest Hemingway

"The real democratic American ideal is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance." Henry Ward Beecher

"A Government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take everything you have." Ben Franklin

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." George Orwell

"When the dream is big enough, the odds don't matter." Chuck Yeager

"If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are thought of as a satirist." Quentin Crisp

"When you catch an adjective, kill it." Mark Twain

"Reality is not always probable, or likely." Jorge Luis Borges

"I haven't failed; I've found 10,000 ways that don't work." Thomas A. Edison

"We don't know who discovered water, but we are certain it wasn't a fish." John Culkin

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." Carl Sagan

"A genius is a genius even when he does not work." Pablo Picasso

"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down." Robert Frost

"Some people are born knowing; others go to their graves wondering. I am of the latter." Antonio Banderas

"Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by a singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance." John Keats

"All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer