Paul Bowles // "Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
Clarice Lispector // "It’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand."
Forough Farrokhzad // "I want to make a hole in everything and penetrate it deep. I want to reach the heart of the earth. My love lies in there, a place where seedlings turn green and roots meet one another and creation continues even in disintegration. I think it has always been this way…in birth and then in death. I think my body is a temporary form. I want to reach its essence."
Ernest Hemingway // "When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out, know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice."
Jane Goodall // "I hope people take away the fact that it is possible to have a different sort of life."
Janis Joplin // "To be true to myself, to be the person that was on the inside of me, and not play games. That’s what I’m trying to do mostly in the whole world, is to not bullshit myself and not bullshit anybody else."
Charlie Chaplin // "There’s something just as inevitable as death. And that’s life. Think of the power of the universe…turning the Earth, growing trees. That’s the same power within you...if you’ll only have the courage and the will to use it."
Krzysztof Kieslowski // "At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she’d been to see my movie. She’d gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really...that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn’t known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There’s something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, making thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It’s worth it."
Jack Kerouac // "Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind."
Björk // "I find workaholism really anti-fertile. For example, in my work with Scandinavian schools with biophilia, it is very apparent that short schooldays and a lot of free time inspires the imagination most and not only makes the kids happier but also they make more original things in the end. I’ve seen how the working until midnight in the biggest cities is really destructive...and you aren’t coming up with any new ideas but just repeating old stuff on a loop."
Lina Kostenko // "The main thing is to look into the eyes of the beast and simply to remain human."
Tracey Emin // "I gave up painting, I gave up art, I gave up believing, I gave up faith. I had what I called my emotional suicide, I gave up a lot of friendships with people, I just gave up believing in life really and it’s taken me years to actually start loving and believing again. I realized that there was a greater idea of creativity. Greater than anything I could make just with my mind or with my hands, I realized there was something…the essence of creativity, that moment of conception, the whole importance, the whole being of everything and I realized that if I was going to make art it couldn’t be about…it couldn’t be about a fucking picture. It couldn’t be about something visual. It had to be about where it was really coming from."
