James Baldwin // “I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney...waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, ‘Look.’ I looked and all I saw was...water. And he said, ‘Look again,’ which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.”
Patti Smith // “I think they have the right to be concerned. Some of the stuff pawned off as freedom of expression, let alone art, is just trash, just jerking off, with no real duty attached. No seeking to elevate. No self-censorship. No conscience. Things seem too open to me now...I don’t know.”
Charles Bukowski // "And remember this: the page you are looking at now, I once typed the words with care with you in mind under a yellow light with the radio on."
Jack Kerouac // “I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I’ll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone’s lapel and make them confess to me and to all.”
Margaret Atwood // “Why do men feel threatened by women? I asked a male friend of mine. 'They're afraid women will laugh at them,' he said. 'Undercut their world view.' Then I asked some women... ‘Why do women feel threatened by men?’ 'They're afraid of being killed,' they said.”
Stanley Kubrick // “The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not in the think of it.”
Pablo Picasso // “When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope.’ Instead, I was a painter and became Picasso.”
Philip Johnson // “We do pretty much whatever we want to.”
Albert Einstein // “A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest.”
Lauren Bacall // “I believe in the truth, and I believe in saying what you think. Why not? Do you have to go around whispering all the time or playing a game with people? I just don’t believe in that. So I’m not the most adored person on the face of the earth... There are a lot of people who don’t like me at all, I’m very sure of that. But I wasn’t put on earth to be liked. I have my own reasons for being and my own sense of what is important and what isn’t, and I’m not going to change that.”
Sly Stone // "Different strokes, for different folks."
Julio Cortazar // “What most people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I’ve seen them. As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that breaks your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. They probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it’s just the opposite...You don’t pick out the rain that will soak you to the bone when you leave a concert.”
