Ernest Hemingway // "When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve."
David Lynch // "I don’t like going out anyway. I like to stay at home. Of course I do think it’s important sometimes to go out and see new things and feel the so-called reality. And that can conjure ideas. But I think human beings can sense the air and feel what’s going on in the world without going out."
Jack Kerouac // "I have the right ideas, but my words are too complicated. I need to simplify them, so that people won't get lost in the dark when they see and hear them. I want them to shine like beacons of light in a world of overly complicated darkness. One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
Toni Morrison // "I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls...he asks, 'How are you?' And instead of 'Oh, fine...and you?', I blurt out the truth: 'Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything...I’ve never felt this way before…' I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: 'No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work...not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job.' I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed... This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."
Rei Kawakubo // "It would have more meaning for me to hear what critics have to say if their values and their ways of living were deeper and more serious."
Walt Whitman // "The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment...to put things down without deliberation...without worrying about their style...without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote, wrote, wrote… By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught."
Frank Zappa // "Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
Robert Doisneau // "I prefer my hesitations, my false paths, my stammering, to a preconceived idea."
Alice Walker // "Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change... Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant... Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening... Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of personality is about to be revealed."
Salvador Dali // "I enjoy tremendously every single moment of my life because death, all the time, is very close watching me and death might catch me. And every five minutes death don't catch me, I enjoy tremendously."
Le Corbusier // "You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction... But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: This is beautiful. That is Architecture. Art enters in."
J. Krishnamurti // "For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, 'Tell me all about it, what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear."