'And when a man tells you that you know nothing and you
are not nettled at it, then you may be sure that you have begun
the work.' --Epictetus

Writing for publication is the slot machines without Vegas.

"Dickens did not write what the people wanted.
Dickens wanted what the people wanted."
--G K Chesterton

Shallow noise is noise. Deep noise is sense.

"The superior man is exacting of himself; the
common man is exacting of others." --Confucius

"For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we
often repeat, that no Lie can live forever." --Thomas
Carlyle

Physical habits are like canyons & gullies--traces of
innumerable mental habits, weather we keep no other
records of. Rain, we say; it falls. No one gathers it up.

Order & Control are as different as a diamond & a
diamond mine.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man pokes
his eye out.

Swim exactly 12 inches under water.

A life is not a long time to be asleep. An hour is a
long time to be awake.

For every signalless lane change, a baby will be
born deformed.

There is no soft word for a soft death, that does not
sound like love.

A adult is someone who flunked adolescence.

I think i have a privileged seat at this melodrama just
because i found a program & opera glasses when i
sat down.

When you see a UFO, you want to tell the world--partly
to prove it wasn't a hallucination. I'm that way about
my insights sometimes.

Reverence won't get you there, but you won't get there
without it.

Nothing is as beautiful as a flock of birds at dusk. I
look at it, then turn away, having learned only the futility
of all my art. I should look longer next time, & learn more.

A painting is much more like a stray kitten that you pick
up & take home, than a child you give birth to. As people
come to resemble their pets, artists develop a style... Not
developing a style means you are the stray cat that goes
from home to home. We revere & distrust Picasso as if he
were Genghis Khan, king of the nomadic hordes. --Our
own nomads being lost.