In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak. — Tom Robbins

"Not naive," Conch Shell had corrected him, "He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear."

...she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to perceive them, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it — which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages," and those who act upon it, we call "artists."

A person can't make a career out of somebody else's invective.