Keith Haring // "No matter how long you work, it’s always going to end sometime. And there’s always going to be things left undone. And it wouldn’t matter if you lived until you were seventy-five. There would still be new ideas. There would still be things that you wished you would have accomplished. You could work for several lifetimes… Part of the reason that I’m not having trouble facing the reality of death is that it’s not a limitation, in a way. It could have happened any time, and it is going to happen sometime. If you live your life according to that, death is irrelevant. Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do."
Antonin Artaud // "Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection."
Miles Davis // "Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent."
Anais Nin // "The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself."
Gordon Parks // "I was…born with a need to explore every part of my mind. And with long searching and hard work, I became devoted to my restlessness."
Apsley Cherry-Garrard // "Those…days, would prove some of the happiest of my life. Just enough to eat and keep warm, no more…no frills or trimmings: there is many a worse and more elaborate life...the luxuries of civilisation satisfy only those wants which they themselves create."
Audrey Hepburn // "I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it."
Philip Glass // "Finally, ultimately, you write...for yourself. I mean, I need a public, I need people to play, I need everything else. I'm not working in isolation. But finally the man...is alone. And I have to respond to those criteria which are almost like inner needs or inner responses."
Saul Leiter // "There are the things that are out in the open and then there are the things that are hidden, and life...the real world has more to do with what is hidden, maybe. You think?"
Tracey Emin // "True art…art with conviction, with emotion, carries a certain amount of weight… It’s like all that emotional hell, screaming, passion and whatever else goes into the artwork is sucked into it, and they just emit, like capsules, pulsing and breathing wherever they exist."
Patti Smith // "We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves."
Virginia Woolf // "Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm... What rhythm is...goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it."
