Patti Smith (& Robert Mapplethorpe) // We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. 'Oh, take their picture,' said the woman to her bemused husband, 'I think they're artists.' 'Oh, go on,' he shrugged. 'They're just kids.'
Carson McCullers // "Fear is a primary source of evil...When the question 'Who am I?' recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: 'Since I do not understand 'Who I am,' I only know what I am not.' The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance, and racial hate. The individual can only reject and destroy."
Philippe Petit // "Limits exist only in the souls of those who do not dream."
John Malkovich // "Accomplishment may be the result of ambition or drive...I think I probably have lots of drive. But I don’t have any ambition. I never really had any... I don’t have a hugely high opinion of ambition. I think of ambition as the need to prove something to others, and the need to be recognized. A need for rewards outside of the work. Drive motivates you to do whatever it is you’re doing as well as you can. That’s an important distinction."
Jean-Michel Basquiat // "Most young kings get their heads cut off."
Lucian Freud // "A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation, but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realizes that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then, he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life...It is this great insufficiency that drives him on. Thus the process of creation becomes necessary to the painter, perhaps more than...the picture."
Michel Houellebecq // "Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world."
Cher // "All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others."
Zygmunt Bauman // “As you rightly point out, refugees end up all too often cast in the role of a threat to the human rights of established native populations, instead of being defined and treated as a vulnerable part of humanity in search of the restoration of those same rights of which they have been violently robbed. There is currently a pronounced tendency, among the settled populations as well as the politicians they elect...to transfer the 'issue of refugees' from the area of universal human rights into that of internal security. Being tough on foreigners in the name of safety from potential terrorists is evidently generating more political currency than appealing for compassion for people in distress... As recently as a few weeks ago, those newcomers may have felt just as safe at home as we do right now. But now, they look at us, deprived of their homes, possessions, security, often their 'inalienable' human rights... No wonder the successive tides of fresh immigrants are resented... They are embodiments of the collapse of order...they reveal insecurities to us... By stopping them on the other side of our properly fortified borders, it is implied that we’ll manage to stop those global forces that brought them to our doors... Such discursive acrobatics leave the causes of these crises unexamined, and those responsible untouched by guilt. In a culture that ennobled the pursuit of self-betterment and happiness...it is nothing less than utter hypocrisy to condemn those who try to follow this precept but are prevented from doing so by lack of means or proper papers.”
Bob Dylan // “Destiny is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you’re about will come true.”
Sebastião Salgado // "It’s more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera."
Zadie Smith // "Not everyone wants this conventional little life you're rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire...I'm not afraid."