Frida Kahlo // "I never thought of painting until...I was in bed on account of an automobile accident. I was bored as hell in bed with a plaster cast... I stole from my father some oil paints, and my mother ordered for me a special easel because I couldn’t sit up, and I started to paint."
Joan Didion // "We imagine things...that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it."
Kazuo Ohno // "What can you teach? Not art, that's impossible. Contrary to the common view, art can't be taught. I believe that a piece of work comes out naturally from a human being just like one human being comes out of another... You must have life coming out of you."
Katharine Hepburn // "If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased."
Kurt Vonnegut // "Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow... The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don’t show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward."
Samuel R. Delany // "The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change."
Andrei Tarkovsky // "I think I'd like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn...how to spend time with oneself. That doesn't mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn't grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view."
David Lynch // "Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole."
Charles Bukowski // "A man works under the best conditions and the worst and the work will bear witness to his durability and intent; there are no chosen men... Excellence arrives with the practice of living as truly as possible, and the work which follows is the evidence of what has preceded. Here, in this arena, there are no secret ways, no special access: just one man alone facing the odds. He works on even while losing, saving what can be saved. The centuries concede nothing; the work is the residue, an odd miracle."
Thom Yorke // "I want to be alone and I want people to notice me...both at the same time."
Anais Nin // "I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me...the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself...That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art."
Aldous Huxley // "There are quiet places also in the mind, he said meditatively. But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately...to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head...round and round, continually... What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night...not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep...the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows...a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying... For one's alone in the crystal, and there's no support from the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or to stand on… There is nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die. There would be an end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard of manner."