"Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead."

Gene Fowler

"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little."

Anne Lamott

"Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep."

Catherine O'Hara

"One has to live a life that creates a writer."

Erno Paasilinna

"I believe that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like an old fever, latent always in their blood; or like an old wound throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to
be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of
memory or thought."

Doris Lessing

Man is a “symbolizing, conceptualizing meaning-seeking animal”…”suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."

Clifford Geertz

"All the fairest beauties in the human soul, its greatest victories, and its most splendid achievements are always those which no one else knows anything about, or can only dimly guess at."

Hannah Hubbard

"In our culture, snails are not considered valiant animals-we are constantly extorting people to 'come out of their shells'-but there's a lot to be said for taking your home with you wherever you go."

Susan Cain

"Poets do not go mad; but chess players do."

G.K. Chesterton

"Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destin'd end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day...

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints that perhaps another,

sailing o'er life's solemn main,

a forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

with a heart for any fate;

still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow