A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Interviews by Roberto Alifano 1981-1983
The first step – especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money – the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art. Chuck Palahniuk
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
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, Mere Christianity
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. Thomas Merton , No Man Is an Island
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud. Émile Zola
A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. Leonardo da Vinci
Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep. Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War
this heart yearns…for the salt of unsmelt airunswept thunderstorms…unknown adventures. Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence
A green anole hanging out on the side of my house. They are the only lizards that can change color in North Carolina, but unlike true chameleons they are limited to green or brown.
Everyday Strange 