NITCH

Photo of Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn // "We all want to be loved, don’t we?"

Photo of Willem Dafoe

Willem Dafoe // "There's a real wisdom to not saying a thing."

Photo of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan // "Boy, I hurried... I hurried for a long time. I'm sorry I did. All the time you're hurrying, you're not really as aware as you should be. You're trying to make things happen instead of just letting it happen. You follow me?"

Photo of Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick // "Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism... As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong, and lucky, he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth... Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death...our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

Photo of Jean Cocteau

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."

Photo of Hunter S. Thompson

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."

Photo of Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali // "Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams."

Photo of David Bowie

David Bowie // "I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture I was living in."

Photo of Anthony Bourdain

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."

Photo of Keith Haring

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."

Photo of Walt Whitman

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."

Photo of David Lynch

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."