To will is to select a goal, determine a course of action that will bring one to that goal, and then hold to that action until the goal is reached. The key is action.

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims....

Oscar Wilde

I was twelve when I read my first sf magazine

Philip K. Dick

Trust your instincts: they tend to see you right. By listening to them, at least you can sleep at night.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor

These times of woe afford no time to woo.

William Shakespeare

The aims of life are the best defense against death.

Primo Levi

I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

Salman Rushdie

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

Immanuel Kant

When I had a job catering, I catered a wedding for the Smashing Pumpkins bassist in Indiana. And I served Billy Corgan shrimp off a tray.

Amy Poehler

I do pity unlearned people on a rainy day.

Lucius C. Falkland

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Jonathan Raban

A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave.

John Steinbeck

It is remarkable that jealousy of individual property in land often goes along with very exaggerated doctrines of tribal or national property in land.

William Graham Sumner