Jean Cocteau // "Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like...then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping. What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you."
Hunter S. Thompson // "I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles...a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other...that kept me going."
Salvador Dali // "Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams."
David Bowie // "I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture I was living in."
Anthony Bourdain // "For a dinner date, I eat light all day to save room, then I go all in: I choose this meal and this order, and I choose you, the person across from me, to share it with. There’s a beautiful intimacy in a meal like that."
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."
Walt Whitman // "A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibility of their own souls."
David Lynch // "I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it."
Buckminster Fuller // "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
Audrey Tautou // "I like to look for things no one else catches."
Ingmar Bergman // "I don't want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically... I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency."
Bernardo Bertolucci // "I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is."