I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

The work that I’m proudest of is the work that I’m most afraid of.

Steven Spielberg

The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.

Steven Spielberg

“Every person on this earth struggles to one degree or
another, and the fate of each one of those people has been written by forces beyond your imagination. And yet, and this is the odd part to me, we are and have always been fully responsible for our entire lives. What a marvel, what a great conundrum.”
― John Kreiter, The Art of Transmutation

At that moment he happily became the ‘walking crazy’: those who are conscious of the fact that they have lost their sanity, and that in losing their sanity, they have reached a higher level of existence. And as the walking crazy, the young man closed his eyes and fell deeply within, finding there not darkness but other worlds, complete other spaces where he was free from all physical pain and struggle.

• John Kreiter, The Art of Transmutation

Just imagine being in front of 1,500 people, and you realize you’re being upstaged by an animal that’s completely unpredictable. They’re already tittering because the raccoon has actually sat back on his haunches in front of me while I’m doing this speech about murdering the King of Scotland. I figured I had only one option, which was to play for the raccoon, which was to make him a part of it. And literally, three or four seconds into including the raccoon into my speech, he decided that was really boring and waddled off the stage and got a huge ovation from the audience. It was the kind of thing you were always terrified would happen, and then kind of anticipating and hoping that it will.