My favorite quotes right now are both actually from the arc tutorial:<p>"Macros live in the land of the names, not 
the land of the things they refer to."<p>"One of the things you'll discover as you learn more about macros is how much day-to-day coding in other languages consists of manually generating macroexpansions.  Conversely, one of the most important elements of learning to think like a Lisp programmer is to cultivate a dissatisfaction with repetitive code.  When there are patterns in source code, the response should not be to enshrine them in a list of "best practices," or to find an IDE that can generate them. Patterns in your code mean you're doing something wrong.  You should write the macro that will generate them and call that instead."