“The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment. ”

“Vision, emotion, sincerity, passion and creativity. Without these attributes a writer has only his pen with which to speak to his audience”

“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”

“The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age.”

“A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself”

“You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.”