"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."  --Hunter S. Thompson

"The world used us for an excuse to go mad. . .  then they blamed us afterwards."  --George Harrison

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.  If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."  --Ernest Hemingway

"To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.  If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened.  If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of."  --Akira Kurosawa

"Ignorance is the parent of fear."  --Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

"The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way."  --E.M. Forster

"The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great, and the listeners became great through them."  --John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

"Every sinner has a future, every saint has a past."  --Oscar Wilde

"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking."  --Wm. Butler Yeats

"I tell you this:  no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn." --Jim Morrison & The Doors

"Language is a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes to make the bears dance, when what we long for is to move the stars to pity."  --Gustave Flaubert

"In Sri Lanka, a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts."  --Michael Ondaatje

"The novelist is, after all, God's liar, and if he does his job well, keeps his head and his courage, he can sometimes find the truth that lives at the center of the lie."  --Stephen King

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."  --Wm. Faulkner regarding Ernest Hemingway

"Thank you for sending me your book; I'll waste no time reading it."  --Moses Hadas

"When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work." --George Bernard Shaw

"Trying is the first step toward failure."  --Homer Simpson

"Every year, toys are getting safer while children are getting more dangerous."  --Troy Ehlers

"We get General Information and Specific Information, but none of the Specific Information talks about time or place or methods or means."  --Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security

"Where all is but a dream, reason & argument are of no use, truth & knowledge nothing." --John Locke