Willem Dafoe // "There's a real wisdom to not saying a thing."
Bob Dylan // "Boy, I hurried... I hurried for a long time. I'm sorry I did. All the time you're hurrying, you're not really as aware as you should be. You're trying to make things happen instead of just letting it happen. You follow me?"
Stanley Kubrick // "Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism... As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong, and lucky, he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth... Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death...our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."
Jean Cocteau // "Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like...then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping. What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you."
Hunter S. Thompson // "I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles...a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other...that kept me going."
Salvador Dali // "Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams."
John Lennon (& Yoko Ono) // "They made us believe that each one of us is the half of an orange, and that life only makes sense when you find that other half. They did not tell us that we were born as whole, and that no one in our lives deserves to carry on his back such responsibility of completing what is missing in us. We grow through life by ourselves. If we have good company it’s just more pleasant."
Henri Matisse // "Don’t try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out."
Sophia Loren // "Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against staggering blows... That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go so much further than people with vastly superior talent."