Joan Didion // "I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people. You are getting a woman who, somewhere along the line, misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract...in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor."
Henri Matisse // "The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer."
James Baldwin // "Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death...ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return."
Eva Green // "I like to do things that I adore. It can't be in between. I really need to connect... Because it's not a job. It's almost like a faith or religion. Every time, I give a bit of my soul."
Albert Camus // "You always get exaggerated notions about things you don't know anything about."
Fiona Apple // "People shouldn't have to appear always, you know, stable and content, because people aren't always stable and content. And it makes it harder...because we don't have the freedom to express all of these darker sides of our emotions. Because we're supposed to keep everything very, you know, friendly and polite and appropriate all the time. And I think that every emotion is appropriate whenever it arises."
John Lennon // "People think you want them to do something or say something special...you don't. You just want them to be themselves, so you can be yourself."
Maya Angelou // "Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs, anybody can have that, I mean in truth."
Jack Kerouac // "Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry."