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“Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition”
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“You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room - proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.”
Source : Aaron Copland (2011). “What to Listen For in Music”, p.23, Penguin
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“I read everything I could find: books and online. Sometimes bigger revelations came to me through finer details or something that you wouldn't pick up just by surface reading.”
Source : "'Klondike's' Abbie Cornish, Johnny Simmons on Finding Gold in History". Interview with Lesley Goldberg, www.hollywoodreporter.com. January 22, 2014. 
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“Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship”
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“The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.”
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“Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.”
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“If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total.”
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“Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.”
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“Some temptations cannot be fought. One must close one's mind and fly from them”
Source : A.J Cronin (1942). “the Keys of the Kingdom”
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“The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.”
Source : Aaron Copland (1980). “Music and Imagination”, p.43, Harvard University Press
