Marlon Brando // "Never let the audience know how it’s going to come out. Get them on your time. And when that time comes and everything is right, you just let it fly. Hit them. Knock them over with an attitude, with a word, with a look. Be surprising. Figure out a way to do it like it has never been done before. You want to stop that movement from the popcorn to the mouth. Get people to stop chewing. The truth will do that. Damn damn damn damn, when it’s right, it’s right. You can feel it in your bones. Then you feel whole and you feel good."
Henry Miller (& Anais Nin) // "Death in life...that’s the only death. That’s the real death. Not this death when you depart the body, but being dead while you’re alive. That’s real death, I think."
Helena Bonham Carter // "I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art."
Bruce Lee // "If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
Kurt Vonnegut // "Why me? That’s a very Earthling question to ask...why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Yes. Well here we are...trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."
Henry Miller // "All I seem to have discovered, of importance, is that with every expansion of consciousness...a radical change in morals ensues. Or, to put it more accurately, every innovator, every individual with a fresh vision or a larger vision of life, automatically destroys the existent moral code—in favor of spirit. But his disciples soon establish a new moral code, one just as rigid as the preceding one, forgetting that the spirit will again break the vessel which contains it."
James Baldwin // "The states of birth, suffering, love and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. It is for this reason that all societies have battled with...the artist. I doubt that future societies will get on with him any better. The entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos, literally, in order to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive. And it is absolutely inevitable that when a tradition has been evolved, whatever the tradition is, that the people, in general will suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of time and will be most unwilling and indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it. They do not know how they will live without those traditions which have given them their identity. Their reaction, when it is suggested that they can or that they must, is panic. And we see this panic, I think, everywhere in the world today... A higher level of consciousness among the people is the only hope we have, now or in the future, of minimizing the human damage... Society must accept some things as real; but the artist must always know that the visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and our achievement rests on things unseen. A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven."
Albertine Sarrazin // "I would like to stay like this, lazy, warm, in the silence where only our regular breathing can be heard, without ever having to make gestures, speak words which sell us out and betray us; this moment is real and alive, I stretch it into eternity."
Joni Mitchell // "If you're smart or rich or lucky, maybe you'll beat the laws of man. But the inner laws of spirit and the outer laws of nature, no man can."
Albert Einstein // "Although I am typically a loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those whose strive for truth, beauty and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated."
Bob Dylan // "I get letters from people...young people...all the time. I wonder if they write letters like those to other people they don’t know. They just want to tell me things, and sometimes they go into their personal hangups. Some send poetry. I like getting them...read them all and answer some. But I don’t mean I give any of the people who write to me any answers to their problems. It’s like when somebody wants to tell me what the 'moral' thing is to do, I want them to show me. If they have anything to say about morals, I want to know what it is they do. Same with me. All I can do is show the people who ask me questions how I live. All I can do is be me. I can’t tell them how to change things, because there’s only one way to change things, and that’s to cut yourself off from all the chains. That’s hard for most people to do."
Charles Bukowski // "We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."
