That's what people are like: they want talent, which is inherently peculiar, yet they absolutely don't want the peculiarities connected to it - perha… - Thomas Mann

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

If poets use such expressions it is because they need them, because emotion and experience force them out of them, and so it is, surely, with me, though you think them unbecoming in me. You are wrong. They are becoming to whoever needs them, and he has no fear of them, because they are forced out of him.

...nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles.