How It's Done

Life with its torments is the basis of art.
— Pablo Picasso

To punish me for my contempt of authority, fate made me authority itself.
— Albert Einstein

Claire Booth Luce said that the difference between a pessimist and an optimist is that the pessimist is generally better informed.

During the 1930's Chandler had a black Persian called Taki. He often spoke to her as if she were human. Sometimes he called her his secretary, because she frequently sat on the paper he was about to use or on copy that needed revising.
— Book of Lists #2, Irving Wallace, et alii, p. 113, "12 Famous Cat Lovers," 1.
cf. my own: Cats read with their feet and write with their teeth.

....it becomes overwhelmingly important for us to become detached from our everyday conception of ourselves as potential subjects for special and unique experiences, or as a candidate for realization, attainment, and fulfillment.
— Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite

The fish-trap exists because of the fish: once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap.... Words exist because of meanings: once you've gotten the meanings, you can forget the words.
— Chuang-Tzu

Anyone who can kill a cactus should forget about having plants in his livingroom.
— Ivan Verheye

Donald Elgeti was asked what he would like if he could have anything, and he replied:
A. Unlimited storage at no cost
B. A large income without effort
C. Something to do a lot
D. Lack of physical discomfort

Yeats wrote at the very end of his autobiographical musing Reveries, that "all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens."
— Michael Tobias, Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 1982, p. 24.

I fancy mankind may come in time to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.
— Ben Jonson, quoted in Curiosities of Literature, Isaac D'Israeli, selected and edited by E. Bleiler, pp. 282-283.