I don't think, generally speaking, people become writers because they were the really good, really cool, attractive kid in class. I'll be honest. This is our revenge for people who were much better looking and more popular than us. I was a bit like that, I suppose.

Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born.

Hector Hugh Munro

The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art. The Nude is a beautifully written work of sophisticated connoisseurship that analyzes art in its own terms rather than imposing strident, politicized categories on it. It outlines the major body types, male and female, in Western art and, via a wealth of illustrations, trains the reader's eye to detect and evaluate proportion. This book reveres art

Camille Anna Paglia, From an art

Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.

Kin Hubbard

It was really amazing. I mean, he'd never mentioned that he played in the symphony, like serious violin playing, not fiddle playing. And he just blew us away.

Guy Clark

Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.

Karl Shapiro

Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge -- they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.

Vissarion Belinsky

I learned at a very early age, the easiest thing in the world is to tell the truth, and then you don't have to remember what you said. It has nothing to do with morality, just remembering what you said.

Robert Evans

I remember once acting really cool on a bus with this girl named Stephanie. When I got home, I realized that I had a really big zit on my forehead. If you have acne problems, you really shouldn't be acting like Don Juan.

John Cusack

He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.

Samuel Johnson

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

Brian Eno

When a man begins to understand himself he begins to live. When he begins to live he begins to understand his fellow men.

Norvin Mcgranahan

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

John Ruskin