• The Brodosky Trial

JUDGE: And what is your profession? BRODSKY: Poet. Poet and translator. JUDGE: And who told you that you were a poet? Who assigned you that rank? BRODSKY: No one. (Non-confrontationally.) Who assigned me to the human race? JUDGE: And did you study for this? BRODSKY: For what? JUDGE: To become a poet? Did you try to attend a school where they train . . . where they teach . . . BRODSKY: I don’t think it comes from education. JUDGE: From what, then? BRODSKY: I think it’s . . . (at a loss) . . . from God.

• M. Foucault

“I write in order to change myself and in order not to think the same thing as before.”

• Rumi

"We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth."

• Audrey Hepburn

"If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.”

• Marcus Flutie

"My thoughts create my world."

• Joan Didion

“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”