Alan Moore // "Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness."
Oscar Wilde // "A morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again... I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend."
Milton Glaser // "There's no such thing as a creative type. As if creative people can just show up and make stuff up. As if it were that easy. I think people need to be reminded that creativity is a verb. A very time consuming verb. It's about taking an idea in your head and transforming that idea into something real. And that's always going to be a long and difficult process. If you're doing it right, it's going to feel like work."
Charles Bukowski // "I always resented all the years, the hours, the minutes I gave them as a working stiff, it actually hurt my head, my insides, it made me dizzy and a bit crazy... I couldn’t understand the murdering of my years yet my fellow workers gave no signs of agony, many of them even seemed satisfied, and seeing them that way drove me almost as crazy as the dull and senseless work. The workers submitted. The work pounded them to nothingness, they were scooped-out and thrown away. I resented each minute, every minute as it was mutilated and nothing relieved the monotonous ever-structure. I considered suicide. I drank away my few leisure hours. I worked for decades... I knew that I was dying. Something in me said, go ahead, die, sleep, become them, accept. Then something else in me said, no, save the tiniest bit. It needn’t be much, just a spark. A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it. I think I did. I’m glad I did. What a lucky god damned thing."
Anton Chekhov // "That’s it, I guess. Just go on living, whether you feel like it or not."
Audrey Hepburn // "We all want to be loved, don’t we?"
Willem Dafoe // "There's a real wisdom to not saying a thing."
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?"
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."
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."