“As I’ve gone through life, I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old…At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you’re not old enough yet to be overly influenced by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you think you ‘should’ be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself.”

Walter Murch

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“I don’t believe in this ‘gifted few’ concept, just in people doing things they are really interested in doing. They have a way of getting good at whatever it is.”

Charles Eames

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“Your complete literary man writes all the time. It wakes him in the morning to write, it exercises him to write, it rests him to write. Writing is to him a visit from a friend, a cup of tea, a game of cards, a walk in the country, a warm bath, an after-dinner nap, a hot Scotch before bed, and the sleep that follows it. Your complete literary chap is a writing animal; and when he dies he leaves a cocoon as large as a haystack, in which every breath he has drawn is recorded in writing.”

John Jay Chapman

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“I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”

John Steinbeck

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“Every one of us lives a life we did not expect to live. We begin with passions and dreams and with the basic conviction that all will turn out for the good, more or less. Some of it does turn out for the good. Most of it, though, is a startling combination of the unexpected and the inconceivable. Every door we walk through introduces us to a strange land, and then we set about seeing if this is a place where we can grow.
        For me, New York City has been the great opened door.”

Richard Goodman

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“Poetry is a hypodermic injection of passion. It gets under your skin like snake fangs and poisons you into being alive.”

Mary Karr

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“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Henry James

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“Work: work doesn’t solve everything but when a person is practicing the work that he loves, you can always tell; there is a rhythm in their absorption which shows in the eyes; their eyes glitter with sights brought back from private places: when the right words come together the world becomes at that moment mathematically perfect: so with each stitch of the cobbler’s machine, the tailor’s needle. They are seeing unity, peace, in some tiny fragment of the world and they know that this fragment is themselves.”

Anaïs Nin

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“She refused to sleep in the same bed with a dead love, the skeleton of a passion.”

Anaïs Nin

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