There is a simplicity that exists on the far side of complexity, and there is a communication of sentiment and attitude not to be discovered by careful exegesis of a text.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

Anthony Doerr

The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking

Samuel Johnson

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

John Donne

Successful crimes alone are justified.

John Dryden

Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, and hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, cries out, Where is it?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

So there was a fire inside me. And that fire inside you, it can be turned into a negative form or a positive form. And I gradually realised that I had this fire and that it had to be used in a positive way.

John Newcombe

Let go of the past and go for the future. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you imagined.

Henry David Thoreau

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

Seamus Heaney

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

David Byrne

Every woman I've had a relationship with has found this maddening the fact that I will talk about anything on the stage, and reveal all this stuff, and yet when I'm at home, I clam up and won't discuss anything intimate or personal.

Jarvis Cocker

In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.

John Selden

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

Aristotle