“Mick has to dictate to life. He wants to control it. To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you. That is the most marked difference between us. He can’t go to sleep without writing out what he’s going to do when he wakes up. I just hope to wake up, and it’s not a disaster.”

Keith Richards

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“I am as alive to the world as I have ever been—alive to everything I see and hear and feel. I revel in the spring sunshine, and the cream and purple hellebore in the garden; I listen to a radio discussion about the ethics of selective abortion, and chip in at points; the sound of a beloved voice on the phone brings a surge of pleasure. I think there is a sea-change, in old age—a metamorphosis of the sensibilities. With those old consuming vigours now muted, something else comes into its own—an almost luxurious appreciation of the world that you are still in. Spring was never so vibrant; autumn never so richly gold. People are of abiding interest—observed in the street, overheard on a bus. The small pleasures have bloomed into points of relish in the day—food, opening the newspaper (new minted, just for me), a shower, the comfort of bed. It is almost like some kind of end-game salute to the intensity of childhood experience, when the world was new. It is an old accustomed world now, but invested with fresh significance; I’ve seen all this before, done all this, but am somehow able to find new and sharpened pleasure.”

Penelope Lively

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“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

André Gide

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“I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I’ll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, ‘Where did it all go? Where are they now?’ It’s so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.”

Michael Bierut

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“The savviest piece of advice I got as a rookie reporter-photographer came my first week on the job at the Exeter News-Letter in New Hampshire. The picture editor told me, ‘If you think you’re close, get closer.’ Words to brand on your brain, maybe even your retinas, if you’re being paid to see, especially when laying bare the natural world.”

Dana Jennings

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“The fish looked bigger in the water.”

Ralph Hodgson

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“To the young artist who may be reading this: consider the possibility that you might actually be lucky when you get rejected from stuff. Because of this streak of what appeared to be bad luck, I fell into my life as it is today.”

Lisa Yuskavage

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“I feel that happiness is not so much a sensation (although it can be if you’ve ever visited the Qigong foot-massage places in Chinatown) but a way of seeing, and therefore immediately possible.”

Simon Van Booy

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“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

William Shakespeare

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“There is a way of living which makes for greater airiness, space, ease, freedom. It is like an airplane’s rise above the storms. It is a way of looking at obstacles as something to overcome; of looking at what defeats us as a monster created by ourselves, within ourselves, by our fears, and therefore dissolvable and transformable.”

Anaïs Nin

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“It isn’t the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. That’s where the suffering comes from.”

Pema Chödrön

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“I wrote somewhere that the poet at fifteen wants to be as great as Dante; by twenty-five he wants to be in The New Yorker.”

Donald Hall

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“Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can’t out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.”

Elizabeth McCracken

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“I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.”

Antonio Porchia

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“One drop of water can accomplish very little, but hundreds of millions of drops can cut through rock or, indeed, change the face of the Earth.”

Swami Sivananda Radha

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