"Talent alone cannot make a writer. There..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easilyborn; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.”

“Love is like a hunter, who cares not for the game when once caught, which he may have pursued with the most intense and breathless eagerness. Love is strongest in pursuit; friendship in possession.”

“Freedom has nothing to do with having the right to vote for your oppressor; freedom is not having any form of oppression.”

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

“I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.”

“Bukharin's a swine and surely worse than a swine because he thinks it below his dignity to write a couple of lines.”

“I think leadership is both a trained thing and a natural gift.”

“Viola [Davis] is one of the great actors of her generation. She has one of these moments in the theater that I don't even know how to describe.”

“I will go further, and assert that nature without culture can often do more to deserve praise than culture without nature.”