"I only had the right to sit in the shadows of the world,in complete silence. Whether I was laughed at, or told I was discusting, or thought of as unpleasant I would sit in the shadows."

“Real freedom isn't subject to how others estimate our value; it is in realizing that none are free who find their sense of worth wondering how others measure their lives.”

“I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.”

“Writing on the subway or anywhere is writing. Maybe it's all just writing.”

“Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims.”

Source : "The Rights of Free Men: An Essential Guide to Civil Liberties". Book by Alan Barth, 1984.

“I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.”

Source : Ray Bradbury, Sam Weller (2012). “Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews”, p.306, Melville House

“Maybe when you were born on the top of the mountain you could pretend the mountain didn't matter, but those who climbed it and those born at its base who could never climb at all knew differently.”

“Americans, more than any other culture on earth, are cookbook cooks; we learn to make our meals not from any oral tradition, but from a text. The just-wed cook brings to the new household no carefully copied collection of the family's cherished recipes, but a spanking new edition of 'Fannie Farmer' or 'The Joy of Cooking'.”

“If it feels like your life has become a nasty, brackish puddle of water, never forget that you do possess the power to transform it into a beautiful, rushing stream that will carry you to enlightenment.”