“You have to find out for yourself. Take the leap. Go as far as you can. Try staying out of touch. Become a stranger in a strange land. Acquire humility. Learn the language. Listen to what people are saying.”

“How can you spend hours every day trying in small ways to figure out who you are, then have a near-stranger give you a sentence of yourself that says it better than you ever could?”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

“The more you try to be interested in other people, the more you find out about yourself.”

Thea Astley (1925–2004) Australian novelist

“What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“science can only take you so far and then you have to leap”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

“Usually, in the studio, on this sort of thing … you just go out and have a play over it, and see what comes, and it's usually — mostly — the first take that's the best one, and you find yourself repeating yourself thereafter.”

David Gilmour (1946) guitarist, singer, best known as a member of Pink Floyd

“You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

“Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.”

Barbara Kingsolver (1955) American author, poet and essayist

“He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil.
Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

“What the artist wishes to do — as far as you are concerned — is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.”

Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) English writer and publisher