Like Romeo and Juliet, we may make our lives a lot more difficult, and needlessly so, but we’re like that, we lunatics, lovers, poets, and runners, we woeful yet merry band of humans. – Letitia L. Moffitt on creating drama at HTMLG

“(N)othing has done more to make us dumber or meaner than the anonymity of the Internet.” – Aaron Sorkin in profile at W.

We’re taught to not be excited or over enthusiastic in love, feigned apathy being the preferred method of behaviour. Fuck that. If there’s one thing in this world you should lose your shit for, it’s love. – Yimmy Yayo on chivalry, dickishness and masculinity at Sex & Fashion.

I will work for my conscience, my soul, and my heart, and my child. If that means I live in a small room in the back of my father’s house, so be it. I will be happier there, writing my truth in “fiction,” than I am here, writing your truth in “fact.” – Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez‘s resignation letter from the LA Times at SP Times {via}.

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way. – Cormac McCarthy at The Wall Street Journal

We’re trying to make our life into a fairy tale. – Derek Sivers on Kurt Vonnegut on human behavior.

And underneath the story of BUY THIS and FEAR THIS and HATE THAT, rising up and punching through the infomercial we call public discourse in a moment of danger is this: read books. – Lydia Yuknavitch on the relevance of books at The Rumpus.

Her online life has become an endless, soul-sucking performance. And yet, seeing no other option, she continues marching onward, a child of the digital age, programmed to look only toward the future, still optimistic, somehow, about what she’ll find there. – Sabrina Rubin Erdely on internet celebrity, Kiki Kannibal, at Rolling Stone

“I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.” – Paul Haggis on Scientology at The New Yorker.

It is not as if the youth do not have the talent. But the desire for acceptability supersedes the need for quality; resulting in poor, and in some cases, mediocre literature. – Junot Diaz at Times of India