Nina Simone // "I had spent many years pursuing excellence...now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important."
Chuck Palahniuk // "Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world."
Christian Bale // "I’ve got this love-hate thing with work. But I actually think the love-hate thing is quite a healthy thing to have. If all you do is love...then you’re just going to imitate what you love, right? It takes people to fucking hate it at the same time to make any sort of change to what they’re doing, you know? And to me, that’s when it becomes interesting."
Jack Kerouac // "Pain or love or danger makes you real again."
John Coltrane // "There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror."
Frida Kahlo // "Everyone’s opinions about things change over time. Nothing is constant. Everything changes. And to hold onto some dogged idea forever is a little rigid and maybe naive."
Friedrich Nietzsche // "Active men are usually lacking in higher activity...I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings, but not as quite particular, single and unique men... It is the misfortune of active men that their activity is almost always a bit irrational. For example, one must not inquire of the money-gathering banker what the purpose for his restless activity is: it is irrational. Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics... Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar."
Maurice Sendak // "Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters...I sent him a card and I drew a picture...I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.' Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."
Hunter S. Thompson // "The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
Jeff Buckley // "When a person sings, their body, their mouth, their eyes, their words, their voice says all these unspeakable things that you can’t explain but that mean something anyway. It’s a weird thing...at the end of the night I feel strange, because I feel I’ve told everybody all my secrets."
Diana Vreeland // "You’re not supposed to give people what they want, you’re supposed to give them what they don’t know that they want yet."
Béla Tarr // "Who gives a fuck? I’m not prophetic. I was just an ugly, poor filmmaker. I still am. I don’t have power. I don’t have anything...just a fucking camera... As a filmmaker, you have to believe in the people, in their power, because if you do not believe in the people then why do you make film…for what? If you don’t have hope, you do not do a fucking movie. You don’t do a movie for the money, because the money just comes and goes. It’s not about the money. It’s because you are such a big fucking maniac who believes in people; who believes that people will watch and people will be touched...this is our job."