Jean-Paul Sartre // "There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours."
Martin Luther King Jr. // "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom."
Anne Frank // "Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy."
Charles Darwin // "If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week...the loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect.”
Jeff Buckley // "Grace is what matters, in anything...That’s a quality I admire quite greatly. It keeps you from reaching for the gun too quickly, keeps you from destroying things too foolishly. It keeps you alive and it keeps you open for more understanding."
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."