Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

My mom said I was an escapist at heart.... that I preferred imaginary worlds to the real one

Amy Plum

Some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and God's own word! Pythagoras says, truly enough, A true assertion respecting God, is an assertion of God; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature.

Henry David Thoreau

In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Laurence J. Peter

Some pray to marry the man they love, my prayer will somewhat vary; I humbly pray to Heaven above that I love the man I marry.

Rose Pastor Stokes

Love's stories written in love's richest books.To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.

William Shakespeare

It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

Joan Didion

Show us a man who never makes a mistake and we will show you a man who never makes anything. The capacity for occasional blundering is inseparable from the capacity to bring things to pass. The only men who are past the danger of making mistakes are the men who sleep at Greenwood.

H. L. Wayland

People ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful.

Joel Spolsky

Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.

Evelyn Waugh

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Margaret Thatcher

There would be no Christmas if there was no Easter.

Gordon B. Hinckley

Never lie when the truth is more profitable.

Stanislaw Lec