Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. - Edward Abbey

Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze into thee.

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him.

Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.