Ira Glass gives excellent advice for creative makers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY&feature=fvwp&NR=1

So many profound ideas...
The Joy of Quiet by Pico Iyer NYTimes Dec 29, 2011

My Dead Friends
I have begun,
when I'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question
to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling
whatever leads to joy, they always answer,
to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy's ashes were-
it's green in there, a green vase,
and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy's already gone through the frightening door,
whatever he says I'll do.
- Poem by Marie Howe from her collection What the Living Do

"You make what you need" - Nancy Bloom

A rabbi spoke with god about heaven and hell.
"I will show you hell" said god and they went into a room which had a large pot of stew in the middle. The smell was delicious but around the pot sat people who were famished and desperate. All were holding spoons with very long handles which reached to the pot but because the handles of the spoons were longer than their arms it was impossible to get the stew back to their mouths. "Now I will show you heaven" said god and they went into an identical room. There was a similar pot of stew and the people had identical spoons but they were well nourished and happy. "It is simple," god said. " You see, they have learned to feed one another."
-unknown

Nuggets mined from Steven Colby's superb blog 
"The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know"  - Harry S. Truman

Excellent collection of objects from all over the world

"Art is either plagiarism or revolution"- Marcel Duchamp

"So I made the decision that it was crucial to like the pots I was making. I just had to step back and make them,    even though they didn’t fit into the way I thought I should work ... I wasn’t going to fire things that I didn’t believe in.
I just had to have a bottom line, some place that I could work toward; I had to make that a real thing for myself. 
It meant that I had to spend more time on the pots. 
- Michael Simon    pg 69 the Studio Potter June 2006 Volume 34 #2

"What passes for hip cynical transcendece of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic"
 - David Foster Wallace