And one would not write were it not for this birth of words that gives us again the hope of a true life.
- Yves Bonnefoy

'Everything you have experienced and are experiencing .. is made of one thing'
'Atoms,' said Lanark.
'No. Print. Some worlds are made of atoms, but yours is made of tiny marks marching in neat lines, like armies in insects, across pages and pages and pages of white paper.'
- Alasdair Gray: Lanark (1981)

"At the moment I allow "my" book to be published (no one makes me do it), I begin to appear-and-disappear, like some unteachable ghost who never earned how to live. The trace that I leave signifies to me both my death, either to come or already past, and the hope that it will survive me. It's not an ambition of immortality, it's structural. I leave behind a piece of paper, I leave, I die: it's impossible to escape from this structure; it is the constant form of my life. Every time I allow something to go forth, I see my death in the writing. The extreme test: One expropriates from oneself without properly knowing to whom one confides the thing one leaves. Who will inherit and how? Will there even be inheritors? That's a question that one is entitled to ask now more than ever."
- Jacques Derrida

I've developed into quite a swan. I'm one of those people that will probably look better and better as I get older, until I drop dead of beauty.
- Rufus Wainwright.

It is odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalised; in many other languages "You" is capitalised; the "i" is lower case.
- Sydney Harris.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
- John Milton; from "Areopagitica"

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
-Hart Crane: from "My Grandmother's Love Letters"

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.
- Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition

Were the offer made true, I would engage to run again, from beginning to end, the same career of life. All I would ask should be the priviledge of an author, to correct, in a second edition, certain errors of the first.
- Benjamin Franklin