If <i>I</i> were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable. - J. D. Salinger

The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.

"I think that one of these days," he said, "you're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. But immediately. You can't afford to lose a minute. Not you."

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.