A Pointed Genius

Sartre has said that genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.
— Hayden Corrith, preface to Nausea

Palindromic sentence:
....say I'd said,"I like wonder, do they say I said Otto said I say they do wonder," like I said I'd say....

What would be left of our tragedies if a literate insect were to present us his?
— Cioran

I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worth while to write this book.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, Chapter Six (i), entire chapter.

The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having a personal form. The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here. For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions of the universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were small active centres on our own account.
— William James, The Will to Believe, 1896.

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
— James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 190.

A passage comes to mind from a novel in which Pursewarden speaks about the role of the artist in life. He says something like this: "Aware of every discord, of every calamity in the nature of man himself, he can do nothing to warn his friends, to point, to cry out in time and to try to save them. It would be useless. For they are the deliberate factors of their own unhappiness. All the artist can say as an imperative is: 'Reflect and weep.'"
— Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar, pp. 131-132.

I believe you capable of any evil: therefore I desire of you the good.
     In truth, I have often laughed at the weaklings who think themselves good because their claws are blunt!
— Frederich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra