It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

Don't be too precious about your craft... there's only 26 letters and 12 notes, and Shakespeare and Beethoven said it all better than any of us ever will

This is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth – actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.

CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.

We all suffer alone in the real world true empathy's impossible.

I don’t really mean what I’m saying.

Don't do what you're taught to do, do what you love to do.

The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.

We are who people think we are.

Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win.

Ya' know, these days kids seem to be getting younger and younger.

It seems like the big difference between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love, with having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.

Fiction either moves mountains or it's boring it moves mountains or it sits on its ass.

Lightfoot's voice is such a part of the fabric of Canada, I know it almost as well as I know my own voice.