“I have staked my career—my life itself—on the things I could see, on the stories I could credit, and on the eventual vindication, when the book was closed, of the reasonable and skeptical approach. In the face of twenty-five years of bloodshed, mayhem, criminality, and the universal human pastime of ruination, I have clung fiercely to Occam’s razor, seeking always to keep my solutions unadorned and free of conjecture, and never to resort to conspiracy or any kind of prosecutorial woolgathering. My mother, whenever she was confronted by calamity or personal sorrow, invoked cosmic emanations, invisible empires, ancient prophecies, and intrigues; it has been the business of my life to reject such folderol and seek the simpler explanation. But we were fools, she and I, arrant blockheads, each of us blind to or heedless of the readiest explanation: that the world is an ungettable joke, and our human need to explain its wonders and horrors, our appalling genius for devising such explanations, is nothing more than the rim shot that accompanies the punch line.”

— Michael Chabon

The God of Dark Laughter https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/09/the-god-of-dark-laughter, The New Yorker (April 9, 2001)

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Michael Chabon96

Novelist, short story writer, essayist 1963

Brunello Cucinelli (1953) Italian entrepreneur and philanthropist

Source: A Day In the Life of Brunello Cucinelli https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/designers/a17874/brunello-cucinelli-profile/ Harper's Bazaar, Lauren McCarthy, 15 September 2016

“What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story, but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn't find any.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), A Cold Day

“I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

“I have wedded the cause of human improvement, staked on it my fortune, my reputation and my life.”

Frances Wright (1795–1852) American activist

Self-written epitaph on her tombstone in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati Ohio (c. 1850)

“I had never realized a woman could have to struggle to keep her hands off a man, but here I was, digging my nails into my palms, staring at the inside of my eyelids as though I could maybe see through them if I peered hard enough.”

Charlaine Harris book Dead to the World

Source: Dead to the World

“I never in my whole life could make a drawing like that; I would at any time have given one of my little fingers to have made such a one”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

one of Girtin's yellow drawings <br class="br">remark of Turner to Chambers Hall, (before 1855); as cited in The Life of J. M. W. Turner R.A. , Walter Thornbury - A new Edition, Revised https://ia601807.us.archive.org/24/items/gri_33125004491185/gri_33125004491185.pdf; London Chatto & Windus, 1897, p. 61 <br class="br">undated quotes

“I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Interview "Who I Am, and What I Think", in Frank Harris's periodical The Candid Friend (May 1901), reprinted in Sixteen Self Sketches, 1949, p. 53; quoted in Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 1984, p. 42 https://books.google.it/books?id=V5KvCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA42 <br class="br">1900s

“I think journalism was the most important thing I could have done with my life. I just can't think of anything I could have done with my life that would have been more meaningful.”

John Seigenthaler (1927–2014) American journalist, writer, and political figure

Reported in his Tennessean's obituary; quoted in "John Seigenthaler dies at 86" http://www.poynter.org/2014/john-seigenthaler-dies-at-86/258597/ by Andrew Beaujon, poynter.org (11 July 2014)

“I was very fond of strange stories when I was a child. In my village-school days, I used to buy stealthily the popular novels and historical recitals. Fearing that my father and my teacher might punish me for this and rob me of these treasures, I carefully hid them in secret places where I could enjoy them unmolested. As I grew older, my love for strange stories became even stronger, and I learned of things stranger than what I had read in my childhood. When I was in my thirties my memory was full of these stories accumulated through years of eager seeking. […] I have sometimes laughingly said to myself that it is not I who have found these ghosts and monsters, but they, the monstrosities themselves, which have found me!”

Wú Chéng'ēn (1500–1582) Chinese writer

Preface to a collection of short stories about monsters, now lost, as quoted in Arthur Waley's introduction to the American edition of Monkey (New York: Grove Press, 1943)

“I’m sure you’ve run into people who’ve said, “If I just had the time, I could write a book.” Everybody thinks they can write a book. And everybody’s life story could be the subject of a book — I don’t care who they are. It depends how you approach it. But writing itself, either you have it or you don’t have it. -->”

Taylor Caldwell (1900–1985) Novelist

1970s-, The Captains, the Kings, and Taylor Caldwell (1978)

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