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How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: The Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages. The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.

—Chuck Palahniuk

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The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

—Charles De Gaulle

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Death is everywhere. It may be the headlights of a car on a hilltop in the distance behind. They may remain visible for a while, and disappear into the darkness as if they had been scooped away; only to appear on another hilltop, and then disappear again. Those are the lights on the head of death. Death puts them on like a hat and then shoots off on a gallop, gaining on us, getting closer and closer. Sometimes it turns off its lights. But death never stops.

—Carlos Castaneda

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Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

—W. H. Auden

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Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

—Charles Bukowski

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Once in a museum [painter Pierre] Bonnard persuaded his friend Vuillard to distract an attendant while he approached his own old painting, slipped from his pocket a tiny box of paints and a brush the size of a toothpick, and added to one of his consecrated canvases minute touches that set his mind at rest.

—Annette Vaillant

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Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy.

—Clive Bell

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The most beautiful paintings and sculptures, the greatest poetry, have not always been born from torment or bitterness. Often they have sprung from contemplation, from joy, from an instinct or wonder toward all things. To create from joy, to create from wonder, demands a continual discipline, a great compassion. . . . With time and sincerity, you will discover a way to work and write that does not harm you spiritually, that does not tempt you to vanity, that is the deepest expression of your spirituality. You will find a voice that is not your voice only, but the voice of Reality itself. . . . If you can be empty enough, that voice can speak through you. If you can be humble enough, that voice can inhabit you and use you.

—Thuksey Rinpoche

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Trouble is said to be good for an artist's soul but almost never is.

—Rita Mae Brown

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The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him.

—John Berryman

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The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

—Michel de Montaigne

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Despair is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality — it is a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.

—Philip Slater

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Every few years when it's been another five years that have passed and I haven't made a film and the depression starts taking over totally, I allow myself to do a commercial. And then I feel really dirty and get to work promptly.

—Terry Gilliam

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It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill — it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.

—Vincent Van Gogh

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It is quite hard at times to distinguish a genius from a lunatic.

—Dorothy Thompson

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