James Smith

“I can examine how, but not why, I wrote what I did, or why I had so perversely deviated from my original path. Can one, tracking and successfully collaring a criminal, truly comprehend the criminal mind? Can we truly separate the how and the why?”
― Patti Smith, Devotion

“What finally convinced me to go ahead was simply that I was so unhappy not going ahead. I was developing symptoms. As soon as I sat down and began, I was okay.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“Termed variously as "secularization," "religious disenchantment" or "modernism," this movement has given rise to an essentially new form of consciousness. It has construed knowledge as empirically demonstrable facts; it has subordinated ethics and aesthetics to what works or is workable; it has reduced intimacy to sexuality and inflated sexuality to fetishism. It has come to see faith as belief or a belief system and, in what passes for tolerance or "understanding," maintains a dogmatic attitude of relativism regarding the truth or appropriateness of all such "systems of belief.”
― James W. Fowler

“She grew up in the days when lamps ran on whale blubber, guitars were strung with catgut, and pig brains were a delicacy. Imposing my pampered millennial morality on the situation would be an insult to her entire generation.”
― George Watsky