Roxanne

“Faking violin stardom ultimately allowed me to return to what captivated me at four years old when I first heard Vivaldi's "Winter." It wasn't the desire to be seen as talented, or a ticket to the big city, or worldly success, or respect. It wasn't The Money. It was simply this: I loved a song. Playing the role of a famous, world-class violinist allowed me to return to the feeling that playing the violin doesn't require anything more than loving a song. Or anything less.

As Mr. Rogers says at the end of the trumpet factory episode, right after he explains that as a kid he pretended he was a songwriter on TV, right before he begins to sing on TV:

'It helps to play about things. It helps you to know how it really feels.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

“The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can't imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn't matter. It isn't. Much the way you don't know what a writer will go on to write, you don't know what a reader, having read you, will do.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“It's a strange time to teach someone to write stories. But I think it always is. This is just our strange time.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved