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“Ninety-nine percent talent…ninety-nine percent discipline…ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It is never as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“They continued to jeer at him, but he said nothing more. He leaned on the rail, looking down at the trout which he had already spent, and suddenly the acrimony, the conflict, was gone from their voices…they too partaking of that adult trait of being convinced of anything by an assumption of silent superiority. I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue…”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“They had started speaking of "women and children" - that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times. Each felt that all he loved best in the world was at stake, demanded revenge, and was filled with a not unpleasing glow...”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.”
― Ian McEwan