The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

P.D. James

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._James

Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages – all of this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronised, put-down and underpaid person.

Doris Lessing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read…It is not true that we only have one life to live; if we can read, we can live many more lives and as many kinds of wishes as we wish.

S.I. Hayakawa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._I._Hayakawa

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

Seneca the Younger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger

Find your myth and live with it.

Carl Jung

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention.

George Orwell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

Literature nowadays is a trade…the successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets.

George Gissing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gissing

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Wallace Stevens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens

To float like a cloud, you have to go to the trouble of becoming one.

Robert Genn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Genn

What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves?

Hannah Arendt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt