“I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Part of it is just learning what makes me happier and doing more of it, and learning what makes me unhappier and doing less of it.”

Mark Frauenfelder

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Mark Frauenfelder

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“I use Pelikan black drawing ink, and the crow-quill pen nibs. And you stick them in a handle. They’re all getting harder to find, all these antique art instruments. The companies that have made them are dying off one by one. But I got lucky. One day about six or seven years ago, my daughter, Sophie, bought a box of old pen points at a flea market in France. She found a box of about a hundred drawing pen points, and they’re the best ones I’ve ever used. They last and last, everything about them is fine, the point, the tensile quality, even the metal, the glass. The metal was just better, back then. I’ve still got maybe fifty of those. I think they’ll probably last me the rest of my life.”

R. Crumb

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“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”

Anaïs Nin

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“…I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.”

President Barack Obama

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“I’ve discovered that one’s ‘ideal editor’ changes as one ages. At 83, with one eye gone and a lot of my hearing, my ideal editor is a young woman, preferably a pretty one, who doesn’t necessarily know anything about prose but who is a good driver and willing to take me on long journeys in my car.”

E. B. White

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“It can take years to find the right art supplies.”

Bill Griffith

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“The healthiest food in the supermarket—the fresh produce—doesn’t boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don’t have the budget or the packaging. Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.”

Michael Pollan

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“I’m married to my calling, but I’m not married to a particular woman. I have no pets. My apartment is full of books and records, the light of Toni Morrison and John Coltrane.”

Cornel West

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“I always seem to be trying to do six or seven different poems at the same time and just hoping I can keep them all well-nurtured enough so that one of them will suddenly get strong enough to take over all by itself until it is done.”

Elizabeth Bishop

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“It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life.”

Laurie Colwin

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“It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.)”

Michael Pollan

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“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Michael Pollan

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“Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.”

Douglas Adams

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“When I am composed I feel no need of affiliating myself with anybody. There is a lot of the cat in me, and cats are not joiners.”

E. B. White

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