“Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train.”

I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.

We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.

People that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.

I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.

There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…

a dream can be the highest point of a life

I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.

I think people associate genre and music style with creativity, but it’s all creativity regardless of what pipeline it comes down.

Creativity is magic. Don’t examine it too closely.

Arthur V. Berger commenting on the music of Aaron Copland: Here is at last an American that we may place unapologetically beside the great recognized creative figures of any other country.

A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.

Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.

Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen.

The truth is that no matter how many retakes you do, each will be different and that is the nature of any creative medium. There’s no such thing as perfection.

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits: This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid. Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.