In commenting on Bernard Madoff and the crash, Warren Buffet said, “You only learn who’s been swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

In “Why I Write” from Picked-Up Pieces, John Updike says, “Storytelling, for all its powers of depiction, shares with music the medium of time, and perhaps its genius, its most central transformation, has to do with time, with rhythm and echo and the sense of time not frozen as in a painting but channeled and harnessed as in a symphony….”

Diane Ackerman, who used the Internet while working on her book, The Zookeeper’s Wife, says: “The Internet is a volume in our library, a colorful, miscellaneous, and serendipitous one — but not a replacement for books, and certainly not an alternative to spending time in the world and just paying attention to things.”

Jan Frel, a cultural critic and editor at the progressive news site AlterNet, holds that writing in general, rather than a reliance on oral tradition, has had a deleterious effect on culture.

In an article about Salman Rushdie in a New York Times Sunday Arts and Leisure section about the time his novel The Enchantress of Florence came out,  he was quoted as saying, “There’s a writing self which is not quite your ordinary social self and which you don’t really have access to except at the moment when you’re writing, and certainly in my view, I think of that as my best self …. To be able to be that person feels good; it feels better than anything else.”

Peter Jenkins, a home-schooled student I worked with when he was in high school, was quoted as saying the loveliest thing about a stream: “Getting to know Patten Stream is like a love that develops slowly. Each visit brings new surprises and enjoyment. Each stretch of brook. each day and hour brings a new mood …. I have been awed by the rushing water after a rainstorm and watching the mist settle over the beaver meadows at dusk.” I wish I could claim credit for having taught him to write like that, but these words and the thoughts and feelings they convey are all his.

In an interview on the subject of his 2008 book, The Way We Work, David Macaulay said, “A sense of your own mortality is a pretty strong motivator to find out what’s happening to this machine, and how it’s losing a little bit of its amazing ability to take care of itself.”

Ezra Pound offers an interesting  theory on the relationship of poetry to music and dance: “Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”

Ezra Pound defines “good writers” in an interesting way: “Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.” This has been my mission in life, so am I a good writer or just an efficient, accurate, and clear writer? Remains to be seen . . . .

Ezra Pound said of reading, “Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.” I wonder whether a woman should feel the same way?