The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness , of fear and pleasure; it's a little like making love, the physical act of love.

A man cannot speak to his son, but as a father; to his wife, but as a husband; to his enemy, but upon terms: whereas a friend may speak, as the case requires, and not as it sorteth with the person.

Because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

The bee enclosed and through the amber shown Seems buried in the juice which was his own.

The voice of the people has about it something divine: for how otherwise can so many heads agree together as one?

O life! An age to the miserable, a moment to the happy.