“The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.”

"A nuclear missile silo is one of the quintessential Great Plains objects: to the eye, it is almost nothing, just one or two acres of ground with a concrete slab in the middle and some posts and poles sticking up behind an eight-foot-high cyclone fence: but to the imagination, it is the end of the world." Ian Frazier, Great Plains, 1989

A recent Saturday morning found Mr. Kelley rambling in the garden while smoking an herbal palliative the size of a cigar. He self-medicates in this fashion at certain times of the day, like when he is awake and doesn’t have food in his mouth.

If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded them, and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts.

If an inquiry thus carefully conducted should fail at last of discovering the truth, it may answer an end perhaps as useful, in discovering to us the weakness of our own understanding. If it does not make us knowing, it may make us modest. If it does not preserve us from error, it may at least from the spirit of error; and may make us cautious of pronouncing with positiveness or with haste, when so much labour may end in so much uncertainty.

You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else - that's how you'll get ahead. (p. 19)

Kleon, A. (2012). Steal Like An Artist. Ten Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. Workman Publishing Company: New York.

“Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules (‘reality’). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge.”

— Paul Buchheit