Books don’t just furnish a room. A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you’d like to know.

— Michael Dirda in his farewell column for The American Scholar

In information parlance, the enemy is “noise”–a perfect word for all the random interferences with what man or nature is trying to say. Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page and the caption that doesn’t quite explain what’s happening in the picture. Noise is handwriting that’s hard to read. Noise is distortion on the TV screen. Noise is the lapse of memory, the slip of the tongue, the wrong neuron fired by the brain–anything that brings disorder to the intended order of a message.

— William Zinsser in Writing to Learn, first published in 1988

“If you are interested at all, as I told you I was, in whether there are designs and shapes in the passage of events, then design is very important to you. It’s very important whether the design or shape or form of a series of events is really in the thing or whether it’s something that you, the artist, have manufactured. It’s important to me that there is a design and shape to quite a few things that we do in our life. So I’m very, very careful. I don’t want to be cheating; I want to get the design as exactly as I can, in itself, not from me.”

— I’m on a Norman Maclean kick.

“Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.”

— From music theorist John Cage’s list of ten rules and one hint.

“Get action. Do things; be sane; don’t fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action.”

— Theodore Roosevelt