“All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.”

Variant: Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom.

Objecting to his sister Elisabeth, about her marriage to the anti-semite Bernhard Förster, in a Christmas letter (1887) http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/nlett1887.htm in Friedrich Nietzsche's Collected Letters, Vol. V, #479
Context: You have committed one of the greatest stupidities — for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy. … It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is as pronounced as possible, but the relation to Förster, as well as the aftereffects of my former publisher, the anti-Semitic Schmeitzner, always brings the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must belong to them after all. … It arouses mistrust against my character, as if publicly I condemned something which I have favored secretly — and that I am unable to do anything against it, that the name of Zarathustra is used in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet, has almost made me sick several times.

Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (1982)

Letter sent to the ECLC after Dylan received the Tom Paine Award at the Bill of Rights dinner on December 13, 1963, as reported in "Mr. Dylan Regrets" http://www.hotpress.com/Bob-Dylan/music/interviews/Mr-Dylan-Regrets/2836632.html by Niall Stokes, Hot Press (11 November 2005)

Section 1.14 <!-- p. 40 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.

Interview by Kate Sullivan for Allure, April 2010