Is this where you wanted to be?
Or would you rather go back to Linda's secret Shad page?

• Quentin Crisp:

  It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying "Really I was meant to be a ballet dancer." By that time, pigs will be your style.

• Neil Gaiman:

  When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

  There is one sense in which the careers of all creative individuals are similar: They are not careers in the ordinary sense of the term. Most of us join an organization at an entry level, perform a prescribed role for a number of years, and leave at a higher level. What we do during this period is more or less known in advance, and others could do the same job if we didn't ... These roles are relatively fixed, and we fit into them ... In contrast, creative individuals usually are forced to invent the jobs they will be doing all through their lives ... So creative individuals don't have careers; they create them ...

• Audobon Jan/Feb 2000:

  Although he knew no one who was professionally recording natural sounds, [Gordon] Hempton accepted that as his mission. He began seeking advice, pouring out his heart in a torrent of letters to natural resources professionals, bioacoustic experts, academics, musicians--anyone who might have an interest. Only the avant-garde composer John Cage responded. He sent Hempton a steady stream of cryptic notes, including one that read, "Fear is one of the seven essential emotions." "I never knew what he was talking about, but it didn't matter," says Hempton. "The message was that John Cage was writing to me. At a time when everyone else was telling me to get on with my life, John Cage thought my work was important."

• Erika Ritter:

  ...as I always tell high-school kids when I go to schools, there's two great things about being a writer: one is that you get to sleep in, and the other is that no experience is ever wasted.

• Honus Wagner:

  There ain't much to being a ballplayer--if you're a ballplayer.

• Thomas Armstrong:

  One thinks of the story of the three masons working side by side who were asked to describe what they did for a living. The first mumbled, "I lay bricks." The second replied, "I put up walls." The third exclaimed, "I build cathedrals!"

• Charlie Coburn, old music hall singer:

  I sang my song to them, and they didn't like it. So I sang it again, and they still didn't like it. So I sang it a third time and one of them thought he might just get to like it if I changed the tune and altered the words. So I sang it again, just exactly the same way, and, after a bit, they all liked it.

Is this where you wanted to be?
Or would you rather go back to Linda's secret Shad page?