“He carded his fingers through Bach's gleaming hair. "You're like the sun," he whispered."What does that make you?" Bach asked, nuzzling his face into the cradle of Einion's hip and untying his stockings with work-nimble fingers."Common as earth.""More like the moon." Bach sat back on his heels and looked up. His eyes were gravity, night-dark and huge. Einion felt himself about to fall in. "Moving tides with the force of your will, forever holding half of yourself away from the rest of creation, silent and still and seductively changeable. Maddening. Caught in a dance with the sun for all of time." (Einion and Bach from The Prophecy of Ydrys Vega”

“Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. "It was great," he recalled. "I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.”

“Sophie Bach from The Maker:You’re a human being with a personality and a will, and you make choices and think and create. Is there no meaning to you, Adrien Bach?And what about us? Is the way we feel about each other just simulated emotions from some biological process—nothing more?”

“Jules rested the violin and bow on the case and sat down next to Jason. He hesitated for a moment, watching the older man with uncomfortable intensity, then reached for Jason and brushed a single tear from his cheek. For Jason, the touch was electric, and his physical response unexpected.“Bach always touches my soul,” Jules half whispered. His fingers still rested against Jason’s cheek. “He must have known great love, and great pain, to write something so powerful.” Jason realized that his own pain must be showing on his face, because Jules, too, looked sad."I’ve never been religious,” Jules said, his eyes never leaving Jason’s, “but I played this piece in a tiny church once. It was like God was there with me, speaking through me.”When Jason remained silent, Jules leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips. At a loss to explain the intense emotional and sexual response of his own body and equally unable to stop himself, Jasonreached for Jules and returned the kiss. The younger man’s lips tasted of wine and musk, and Jason realized that he was hungry for more.”

“A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they start their creative day.The composer Igor Stravinsky did the same thing every morning when he entered his studio to work: He sat at the piano and played a Bach fugue. Perhaps he needed the ritual to feel like a musician, or the playing somehow connected him to musical notes, his vocabulary. Perhaps he was honoring his hero, Bach, and seeking his blessing for the day. Perhaps it was nothing more than a simple method to get his fingers moving, his motor running, his mind thinking music. But repeating the routine each day in the studio induced some click that got him started.In the end, there is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that's habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started.”

“We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he canplay Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in themorning.”