I don't know if this is the kind of retrospective analysis that people are fond of applying to their work or actions, but it feels like I knew I was going to be famous and I knew that an element of that would be traumatic, so that if I could make myself something big and otherworldly, it would be a kind of defence.

The world is full of willing people some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

Robert Frost

So I try not to have any actual expectations for myself for any level of success or failure.

Gavin DeGraw

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let who will boast their courage in the field, I find but little safety from my shield, Nature's, not honour's law we must obey: This made me cast my useless shield away.

Archilochus

They gave each other a smile with a future in it.

Ring Lardner

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.

Thomas Love Peacock, letter to S

Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. Think about it.

Elias Schwartz

Truth comes to us mediated by human love.

A. N. Wilson

Entertainment isn't just based on the very structured syndrome of European popular music, and it's great that there are so many thousands of people who are of the same opinion.

Robert Plant

Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don't buy that. It's a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't. Every day I sit down and write.

Jodi Picoult

The UN is not just a product of do-gooders. It is harshly real. The day will come when men will see the U.N. and what it means clearly. Everything will be all right -- you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction, and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

Dag Hammarskjold