“When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.”— Paul Auster, amazon.com
“I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.”— Charles Bukowski, amazon.com
“I've earned $47 in 20 years of writing and I think that $2 a year (omitting stamps, paper, envelopes, ribbons, divorces, and a typewriter) entitles one to the special privacy of a special insanity and if I need hold hands with paper gods to promote a little scurvy rhyme, I'll take the encyst and par…”— Charles Bukowski, amazon.com
“A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.”— Charles Bukowski, amazon.com
“Well I'm 34 now. If I don't make it by the time I'm 60 I'm just going to give myself 10 more years.”— Charles Bukowski, amazon.com
“I feel a lot of things. I don’t know anything. I am scared. Sometimes I am filled with joy. I am worried about the world. I am just trying to be a person.”— Kim Quindlen, thoughtcatalog.com
“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”— Mary Oliver, amazon.com
“New York has closed itself off to the young and struggling… New York City has been taken away from you … So my advice is: Find a new city.”— Patti Smith, amazon.com
“Symmetry, Instagram, Kardashians – it's over! Money is over. Rich people need to get weird again, like Diana Vreeland used to be. Like, why don't you quilt yourself a coat of white monkey fur and meander around your apartment?”— Cat Marnell, rollingstone.com
“There aren't any big words in [my] book... And it's not that I don't know those words. I just don't talk like that.”— Cat Marnell, rollingstone.com
“When you’re young and you’re writing you shouldn’t try to philosophize and say what everything ‘is’. If you’re any kind of healthy thinker, your definites today will betray you tomorrow. Instead, write how you feel, write those things that you know without fighting to know. Tell your honest, immedia…”— Adam Gnade, lungs-paper-frail.tumblr.com
“While working on her book, Marnell had stuck to a regimen: waking up at a normalish hour, Barry’s Bootcamp, prepackaged cut veggies and half-sandwiches from Starbucks and 7/11, Adderall just to focus and not to get high, a few drinks with friends, and maybe a little coke, ‘but not, like, lines of it…”— Emily Gould, nymag.com
“Violence can read like poetry. You just have to describe the act as if you’re in love with the way your characters bleed.”— F.K. Preston, amazon.com
“The number one rule of the online media business: You can’t profit off the suffering and pain of your employees forever.”— Eve Peyser, jezebel.com
“He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not a fact; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like th…”— Mary Oliver, amazon.com
“Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity.”— Mary Oliver, amazon.com
“We could have easily become absorbed by the tragedy, lost in it and paralyzed by it, but what came back to us was the instinct to dance. I began as a dancer, and in those days of pain and shock I went back to where I started. Creating dance is the thing I know best. It is how I recognize myself.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com