Franz Kafka // "I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person."
Gloria Steinem (& Dorothy Pitman Hughes) // "Decisions are best made by the people affected by them."
Rick Rubin // "Everyone has their own way of coping and dealing with the world... If something is painful, if you're sensitive or uncomfortable, if you feel like you're different, your choices are to examine this and figure it out, or to numb yourself and ignore it. Most people tend to numb themselves and ignore their problems to avoid how they feel. Most people...just look for ways to kill the pain. We live in a kill-the-pain society. TV kills the pain. Doctors prescribe drugs to kill the pain. Somehow I got into tuning into how I feel and trying to understand it."
Claude Monet // "Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it."
Johnny Cash // "You can ask the people around me. I don't give up...and it's not out of frustration and desperation that I say I don't give up. I don't give up because I don't give up. I don't believe in it."
J.K. Rowling // "He didn't realize that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign...to have been loved so deeply...will give us some protection forever."
Mark Rothko // "I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however, is precisely because I want it to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience...you paint the larger picture, you are in it."
Tennessee Williams // "There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go."
Patti Smith (& Robert Mapplethorpe) // "It's a dark period now because everyone is beguiled by fame... I think that true artists just have to keep doing their work, keep struggling, and keep hold of their vision. Because being a true artist is its own reward. If that's what you are, then you're always that. You could be locked away in a prison with no way at all to communicate what's in there, but you're still an artist. The imagination and the ability to transform is what makes one an artist. So young artists who feel overwhelmed by everything have to almost downscale. They have to go all the way to this kernel and believe in themselves, and that's what Robert gave me. He believed in that kernel I had, you know, with absolute unconditional belief. And if you believe it, you'll have that your whole life, through the worst times."
Ernest Hemingway // "I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across...not to just depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way."
Henry Rollins // "If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don't show them up by getting wasted and wrapping your car around a tree. If you really want to rebel against them, out-learn them, outlive them, and know more than they do."
Diane Arbus // "I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself."