Rainer Maria Rilke // "Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them...the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
Amy Winehouse // "I’m a very romantic person. I don’t mean romantic in a flowers and chocolate kind of way. It’s more like if it’s raining, I’ll go up to the window and press my nose against the glass and sigh at how beautiful it all looks."
Jonas Mekas // "I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade... Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I’ve seen recently...they have already faded... Everything that I see, or read, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors... With me, everything is mood, mood, or else...simply nothingness."
Leonard Cohen // "If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day."
Jeff Buckley // "I need space, stillness...and no telephones. If I write it takes a long time for a certain language to emerge. Because it’s sort of like quitting smoking when you first start writing...it takes a while for the nicotine to leave your system, until you’re totally pure. Then you start."
Sofia Coppola // "I wanted to do an intimate story between…two characters and the idea that you can meet someone and spend two days with them and that can be just as important as someone you’ve known for years."
Bob Dylan // "It dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns...that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale...that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself."
Helena Bonham Carter // "I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art."
Kurt Vonnegut // "Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow... The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don’t show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward."
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."
Tennessee Williams // "The world is violent and mercurial…it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love…love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent, being a writer, being a painter, being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love."
Henry Miller // "To make living itself an art, that is the goal."