MATTHEW C. LUCAS

"I'm a very organized and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel."

- Hilary Mantel

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

- President Theodore Roosevelt (from his speech, "Citizenship in a Republic," delivered at the Sorbonne, Apr. 23, 1910)

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."

- William Faulkner

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."

- Edgar Allan Poe

"To survive, you must tell stories."

― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

"Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories."

― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don't want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there."

- Blood Meridian

(Cormac McCarthy, 1933-2023)

 Asyndeton: (noun) omission of the conjunctions that ordinarily join coordinate words or clauses (as in "I came, I saw, I conquered")

- Merriam Webster Dictionary

"Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors." 

- The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)