Date: 1949-1952, 1953

"Hard, hard work, excavating and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable t...

— Bellow, Saul (1915-2005)

Date: July, 1962; November 22, 1962; 1973

"Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade--demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out."

— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)

Date: 1968

"There is a little man who lives in one's head. The little man keeps a library."

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

Date: 1968

"This is, I think, perfectly correct. The little man [in one's head], as we might say, has in his library pamphlets entitled 'Tying One's Shoes', 'Speaking Latin', and 'Typing 'Afghanistan"', but no pamphlet entitled 'Being Intelligent' or 'Speaking Latin Fluently' or 'Typing "Afghanistan" with P...

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

Date: 1980

"The back of the mind is a small hotel / And when the residents go on picnics / Or take buckets and spades down to the sea / The betrayals begin."

— Longley, Michael (b. 1939)

Date: 1992

"Whenever she thought of what she was meant to say, it seemed to dash around the corner, and lose itself in the crowd of things she should not say. The most successful fugitives were often the dullest, the sentences that nobody notices until they are not spoken: 'How nice to see you...won't you s...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1997

"What caretaker, what Verger of the Temple of the Self...?"

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: August, 22, 2015

"Some philosophers claim that we know nothing of the external world outside our minds--nothing compared to what sways in our minds, in the long, twisting corridors of memory, the vast mental rooms with half-open doors, the ghosts chattering beneath the chandeliers of imagination."

— Lightman, Alan (b. 1948)