Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Henry David Thoreau

Life, they urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all they did by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by language -- language being like the sun, which rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme. There are no follies and no unreasonablenesses so great as those which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct upon reason only.Reason might very possibly abolish the double currency; it might even attack the personality of Hope and Justice. Besides, people have such a strong natural bias towards it that they will seek it for themselves and act upon it quite as much as or more than is good for them: there is no need of encouraging reason. With unreason the case is different. She is the natural complement of reason, without whose existence reason itself were non- existent.If, then, reason would be non-existent were there no such thing as unreason, surely it follows that the more unreason there is, the more reason there must be also? Hence the necessity for the development of unreason, even in the interests of reason herself. The Professors of Unreason deny that they undervalue reason: none can be more convinced than they are, that if the double currency cannot be rigorously deduced as a necessary consequence of human reason, the double currency should cease forthwith; but they say that it must be deduced from no narrow and exclusive view of reason which should deprive that admirable faculty of the one-half of its own existence. Unreason is a part of reason; it must therefore be allowed its full share in stating the initial conditions.http://www.theabsolute.net/minefield/butler.html

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (first pu

At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.

Ama Ata Aidoo

Everyone is as God made him, and often a great deal worse.

Miguel de Cervantes

May Heaven be propitious, and smile on the cause of my country.

Zebulon Pike

The figure of the enthusiast who has just discovered jogging or a new way to fix tofu can be said to stand or, more accurately, to tremble on the threshold of conversion, as the representative American.

Lewis H. Lapham

I love producing. I am loving doing that. I think that is my most natural space in the business. I just love producing or editing and that's where I thrive.

Will Smith

Whenever we have thanked these men and women for what they have done for us, without exception they have expressed gratitude for having the chance to help - because they grew as they served.

Clayton Christensen

There is no power like that of true oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears; Cicero, by captivating their affections and swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished with its author; that of the other continues to this day.

Henry Clay

When I was a teen, I thought I would have to choose between my writing or my music or my art, but it turns out it's a difficult juggling game but I can do all of them.

Maggie Stiefvater

The most efficient way to live reasonably is every morning to make a plan of one's day and every night to examine the results obtained.

Alexis Carrel

On my mom's side I'm Mexican, and my dad is a white dude.

Tyler Posey