You never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write. - Saul Bellow

"Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want."
"I like the way you arrange your life. What do you intend to do with this free time?"
"I intend to use it." I didn't like the implication of this. Why should he need his time free and I be questioned?

Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument — that, friends, is real wisdom.

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.