Miles Davis // "When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that makes it good or bad."
Charles Bukowski // "Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness. Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them. You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it. You are marvelous. The gods wait to delight in you."
Joan Didion // "People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved... I think about people I know who have lost a husband, or wife, or child. I think particularly about how these people looked when I saw them unexpectedly...on the street, say, or entering a room...during the year or so after the death. What struck me in each instance was how exposed they seemed, how raw."
Jim Carrey // "I realized that I could lose myself in a character. I could live in a character. It was a choice. And when I finished with that, I took a month to remember who I was. 'What do I believe? What are my politics? What do I like and dislike?' It took me a while and I was depressed going back into my concerns and my politics. But there was a shift that had already happened. And the shift was, 'Wait a second. If I can put Jim Carrey aside for four months, who is Jim Carrey? Who the hell is that?'... I know now he does not really exist. He’s ideas... Jim Carrey was an idea my parents gave me. Irish-Scottish-French was an idea I was given. Canadian was an idea that I was given. I had a hockey team and a religion and all of these things that cobble together into this kind of Frankenstein monster, this representation. It’s like an avatar. These are all the things I am. You are not an actor, or a lawyer. No one is a lawyer. There are lawyers, law is practiced, but no one is a lawyer. There is no one, in fact, there."
Hayao Miyazaki // "When you die, you can’t see sunsets."
Richard Avedon // "Images have replaced language...and reading. The responsibility to your role in history, in whatever is going to happen to human beings — you are the new writers. And we can no longer be sloppy about what we do with a camera. You have this weapon in your hands...and it is going to teach the world, it’s going to record the world, it is going to explain to the world and to the children that are coming...what this world was like. It is an incredible responsibility."
Jane Goodall // "I hope people take away the fact that it is possible to have a different sort of life."
George Harrison // "Just as cinematic images appear to be real but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusion. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture. One's values are profoundly changed when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion picture and that not in, but beyond, lies his own ultimate reality."
Maya Angelou // "Find a beautiful piece of art...fall in love...admire it...and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less."
Diane Arbus // "I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself."
Peter Beard // "Life is just a flick of the fingers. Let's face it. And any little bit...you can expand it or enrich it, I think you want to push that and do it."
Jack Kerouac // "Everything is ecstasy, inside... Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-endings drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside...and you will remember."