Fiona Apple // "I'm such an incredibly, stupidly sensitive person that everything that happens to me, I experience it really intensely. I feel everything very deeply. And when you feel things deeply and you think about things a lot and you think about how you feel, you learn a lot about yourself. And when you know yourself, you know life."
Albert Camus // "The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning."
Richard Brautigan // "I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end."
Charles Bukowski // "Too many writers write for the wrong reasons. They want to get famous or they want to get rich or they want to get laid by the girls with bluebells in their hair... When everything works best it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that. Once in Atlanta, starving in a tar paper shack, freezing. There were only newspapers for a floor. And I found a pencil stub and I wrote on the white margins of the edges of those newspapers with the pencil stub, knowing that nobody would ever see it. It was a cancer madness. And it was never work or planned or part of a school. It was. That's all... We work too hard. We try too hard. Don't try. Don't work. It's there. It's been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb... It's all free, we needn't be told. Classes? Classes are for asses. Writing a poem is as easy as beating your meat or drinking a bottle of beer. Look. Here's one: Mother saw the racoon, my wife told me. Ah, I said. And that was just about the shape of things tonight. Happy New Year."
Patti Smith // "Put down your cell phones, put everything away, and feel your blood pulsing in you, feel your creative impulse, feel your own spirit, your heart, your mind. Feel the joy of being alive and free."
Philippe Petit // "My journey has always been the balance between chaos and order."
Banksy // "I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower."
Bjork // "Iceland is weird. It doesn’t really have a hierarchy...like, you’ll see the president at the supermarket. If you’re in a bar and the music’s not good, you fix it. When I’m with my Icelandic friends, they’ll be like, 'Ugh, this is rubbish,' and plug their phone in at the bar. We have this group mentality, a strange mix of anarchy and a total hate of authority. We don’t like being told what to do."
David Lynch // "The day you catch an idea you fall in love with, even a small one, is a beautiful day."
Charles Bukowski // "I will remember your small room, the feel of you, the light in the window, your records, your books, our morning coffee, our noons, our nights, our bodies spilled together, sleeping, the tiny flowing currents, immediate and forever. Your leg, my leg, your arm, my arm, your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again."
Joan Rivers // "I wish I could tell you it gets better, but it doesn't get better. You get better."
Ram Dass // "When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, 'You’re too this, or I’m too this.' That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."