“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”

Andy Dougan (August 24, 2006) "Matt hears the sound of wedding bells" Evening Times.

Source: Moab Is My Washpot

Attributed by Banksy on Instagram (October 6, 2018): "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge" - Picasso https://www.instagram.com/p/BomXijJhArX/?hl=en&taken-by=banksy. This was actually written by anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin in his essay "Reaction in Germany," in 1842.

Source: Moore, John (2004). I Am Not a Man, I Am Dynamite!: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition. Brooklyn NY: Autonomedia. p. 87.

Source: Lehning, Arthur, ed. (1973). Mikhail Bakunin: Selected Writings. London: Cape. p. 58.
Misattributed

"Hunting a Hare"; translated by W.H. Auden, p. 13.
Antiworlds, and the Fifth Ace

Address at Bennington College (30 October 1984) http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/reviews/malamud-reflections.html as published in "Reflections of a Writer: Long Work, Short Life" in The New York Times (20 March 1988); also in Talking Horse : Bernard Malamud on Life and Work (1996) edited by Alan Cheuse and ‎Nicholas Delbanco, p. 35
Context: If I may, I would at this point urge young writers not to be too much concerned with the vagaries of the marketplace. Not everyone can make a first-rate living as a writer, but a writer who is serious and responsible about his work, and life, will probably find a way to earn a decent living, if he or she writes well. A good writer will be strengthened by his good writing at a time, let us say, of the resurgence of ignorance in our culture. I think I have been saying that the writer must never compromise with what is best in him in a world defined as free.

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 56.

Section 59
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice
Context: The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "[They] pray not only for [their] daily bread, but also for [their] daily illusion." The rule seems to be that those who find difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.