Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals. – Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927

I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of William Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon. – Bill Hoest (1926–1988)

It is not my sentence that I polish, but my thought. I pause until the drop of light that I need is formed and falls from my pen. – Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), translated from French by George H. Calvert, 1