If in a discussion of many matters ... we are not able to give perfectly exact and self-consistent accounts, do not be surprised: rather we would be content if we provide accounts that are second to none in probability.
The guys who stick around are the smartest guys and the guys who are the most self-driven. You have to have drive. The coaches can only take you so far. You have to want to learn and work.
One must accept the fact that we have only one companion in this world, a companion who accompanies us from the cradle to the grave - our own self. Get on good terms with that companion - learn to live with yourself.
I'm a self-taught musician, so I never really had the restrictions of any one instrument. I would always just sort of pick up instruments and make noise with 'em.
The Hasidic rabbi, Zuscha, was asked on his deathbed what he thought the kingdom of God would be like. He replied, "I don't know. But one thing I do know. When I get there I am not going to be asked, 'Why weren't you Moses? Why weren't you David?' I am only going to be asked, 'Why weren't you Zuscha? Why weren't you fully you?'"
And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.
The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea.
We can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that.
The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination.
By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty.
Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.