“I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything.  Then I write to save my life.  If you are a writer, that will be true.  Writing has saved my life.”

~Louise Erdrich.

“My interest is in the lineage of knowledge and in discovery, in skepticism, and in being able to integrate all of that with what I call human knowledge.  How do we understand more about each other from the way we have discovered things about ourselves in the past?”

~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

“And it’s language, the sheer pleasure of making it and bending it and seeing it form on the page and hearing it whistle in my head  — this is the thing that makes my work go.”

~ Don DeLillo

“If you don’t work, you can’t eat.” ~ James Brown

The Arts are not a way to make a living.  They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense but not irrational or naïve. Art invites us to take the journey beyond price, beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it from even the most tragic of circumstances. Art reminds us that we belong here. And if we serve, we last. My faith in art rivals my admiration for any other discourse. Its conversation with the public and among its various genres is critical to the understanding of what it means to care deeply and to be human completely. I believe.”

~ Toni Morrison