Jeff Buckley // "Life has its own rhythm and you cannot impose your own structure upon it, you have to listen to what it tells you... It’s not earth that you move with a tractor...life is not like that. Life is more like earth that you learn about and plant seeds in… It’s something you have to have a relationship with in order to experience...you can’t mold it, you can’t control it."
Anne Frank // "How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day."
David Bowie // "I wanted to express...a wish to destroy everything that we have ever created. When Nietzsche said 'God is dead,' it was a culmination of all the thoughts of the previous century...people were so aggrandized with their sense of science and the aftermath of the enlightenment and how man himself could improve the world. Then of course, it led to things like...Einstein’s discovery that time and space aren’t what we thought they were, and Freud in understanding another kind of human inside the human. All of these things culminated in the idea that everything we’ve known before was wrong. Everything. So we start the 20th century with this clean slate. We are now the Gods. And the greatest thing that we could do as God during that century was create the bomb. That was what we were good at doing. And I think that in itself...the repercussions of what we had done by standing in for this idea of morality, creating it all ourselves, so destroyed our fix on what we should be doing in life that we’re still living through that chaos right now. We have no spiritual lives to speak of...there is no direct sense of what our purpose is anymore. Now that may be a good thing because it may show itself to be that we, in fact, don’t have a purpose. Are we big enough or mature enough to exist like that? Are we mature enough to accept that there is no 'plan,' there is no 'going somewhere,' there is no gift of immortality at the end of this if we evolve... Maybe we have to exist and live on the idea that we have one day at a time to live...and can we do that? Because if we could do that, we may be serving some, really, some great thing."
Daniel Day-Lewis // "Shoes are strange things. If you take your shoes off in a situation in which you're vulnerable, you'll feel 10 times more vulnerable."
Janis Joplin // "You are what you settle for."
Bill Hicks // "The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, 'Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?' And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, 'Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.' And we…kill those people. 'Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real.' It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok? Jesus (murdered); Martin Luther King (murdered); Malcolm X (murdered); Gandhi (murdered); John Lennon (murdered)... But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as ONE. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace."
John Baldessari // "I’ve always seen art as a conversation between artists... I do something that is trying to speak to other artists, and if they’re listening, they do something that tries to speak back to me."
Bob Dylan // "Let me ask you one question: Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness? Do you think that it could? I think you will find, when your death takes its toll, all the money you made will never buy back your soul."
Miles Davis // "Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent."
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."