The odds are always against you no matter what your previous history is. You have to overcome the tendency to relax.

Why do people do things that they fear? It may be that the fear contains information. Something can be interesting if you get to the other side of that fear.

Craig Ferguson

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

Pablo Picasso

The tools are real. The viewer is real, you, the artist, is real and a part of everything you paint. You connect yourself to the viewer by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you. All you have to do it with is a brush, some chemical and canvas, and technique.

Steven Brust

Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.

Oscar Wilde

The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.

Aesop, The Eagle and the Arrow

You have not found your place until all your faculties are roused, and your whole nature consents and approves of the work you are doing.

Orison Swett Marden

You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.

Marilyn Hacker

I was fantasising about my own death, I started thinking what my funeral would be like and what music would be played, I was at that level of insanity.

Billy Corgan

What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?

Bertolt Brecht

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Thomas Jefferson

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.

Gail Godwin

I think about death a lot, like I think we all do. I don't think of suicide as an option, but as fun. It's an interesting idea that you can control how you go. It's this thing that's looming, and you can control it.

Ryan Gosling