George Orwell // "However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing."
David Hammons // "The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s put to criticism, not to understand and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience? That’s like going into lion’s den. So I refuse to deal with that audience. I will play with the street audience. That audience is much more human, and their opinion is from the heart. They don’t have any reason to play games, there is nothing gained or lost."
Thelonious Monk // "I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public wants...you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing...even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years."
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."