James Baldwin // "No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time."
Leonard Cohen // "May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude."
Billie Holiday // "You can't copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling."
Simone de Beauvoir // "I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way."
Oscar Wilde // "The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist."
David Wojnarowicz // "When I write...I rarely do second drafts. I’ll do a second draft just to clean up typos and maybe a little shift in the structure, but I’ve always been attracted to the way that people who don’t know how to draw, draw. Their energy is so direct between the pencil and the paper and it’s not cluttered with bullshit style. I feel the more drafts you put writing through, the more you repainted the same painting, all the blood was taken out. It no longer had life in it. Anyway, I wrote this thing really fast."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez // "I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature."
James Baldwin // "If we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less."
Jack Kerouac // "Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry."
Joni Mitchell // "Here's the thing. You have two options...They're going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they're going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I'd rather be...changing."
David Lynch // "We all want expanded consciousness and bliss. It's a natural human desire. And a lot of people look for it in drugs. But the problem is that the body, the physiology, takes a hard hit on drugs. Drugs injure the nervous system, so they just make it harder to get those experiences on your own... Besides, far more profound experiences are available naturally. When your consciousness starts expanding, those experiences are there. All those things can be seen. It's just a matter of expanding that ball of consciousness. And the ball of consciousness can expand to be infinite and unbounded. It's totality. You can have totality. So all those experiences are there for you, without the side effects of drugs."
Henry Miller // "I had to learn to think, feel, and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life preserver, which sinks them. Nobody can drown in the ocean of reality who voluntarily gives herself up to the experience. Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge."