No one is ever going to ask you to do the thing you really want to do. This will never happen. So just think about what you’d like to do, and then just start doing it.—Laurie Anderson

“The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don’t listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, ‘We’ve always done it that way,’ I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.”—Anna Quindlen

“Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak..surrender to them. Don’t ask first whether it’s permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.”― Herman Hesse

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”—Margaret Atwood

“Art should enhance our interest in the world, not push us toward greater irony, disinterest, lack of humor and a sense that everything’s all been done before and we can only laugh at it or waste away.”—David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”—C.S. Lewis

“Beware the Ides of March.”

“I don’t get into these long-winded heavy discussions about character—do we do this or that or what. At the end of the day, what you gotta do is just go out there and do it.”—Robert De Niro