Charles Bukowski // "Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness. Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them. You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it. You are marvelous. The gods wait to delight in you."
David Hockney // "I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money. I’m greedy for an exciting life."
Anais Nin (& Henry Miller) // "In you, alone, I have found the same swelling of enthusiasm, the same quick rising of the blood, the fullness… Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on… I never feel the brakes. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring next to mine, then it makes me dizzy."
Jeff Buckley // "The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It’s worth being bashed against. It’s worth getting scarred by. It’s worth pouring yourself over every one of its hot coals."
Sonny Rollins // "I want to be connecting with the subconscious, if I can call it that… There are not too many words to describe the real deep inner part of a human being… I want to be at that place where everything is blotted out and where creativity happens, and to get there I practice… I’m a prolific practicer, I still practice every day. You have to have the skills, then you want to not think when you’re playing, that’s when you let whatever deep level of creativity, spirituality, I mean, you know these words are so inadequate these days, but you want to get to this place where they exist."
Jack Kerouac // "Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot."
Henry Miller // "If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked."
Ayrton Senna // "At the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do...at the same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile."
Patti Smith // "That’s what artists do, that’s what poets do...we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we’ve made in order to get to the core place where we started from."
Édouard Boubat // "You cannot live when you are untouchable. Life is vulnerability."
Anthony Bourdain // "Be a fool. For love. For yourself. What you think might possibly make you happy…even for a little while…whatever the cost or good sense might dictate."
Anais Nin // "We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."
