Billie Holiday // "People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to do something the way you want to do it."
Johnny Cash // "You can ask the people around me. I don't give up...and it's not out of frustration and desperation that I say I don't give up. I don't give up because I don't give up. I don't believe in it."
Ingmar Bergman // "Here in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity. It oozes out of me like a broken tube of toothpaste; it doesn't want to stay within the confines of my body. A strange feeling of weight and volume. Soul volume perhaps, which rises like clouds of smoke and envelops my body."
Patti Smith (& Robert Mapplethorpe) // "He asked...'Did art get us?' The question for me wasn't if art got us. The question was, 'Do we regret that?' I know art got us, because if art gets you, you can never be normal. You can never enjoy. You can't go anywhere without trying to transform it, you know? You go to church to pray, and you start writing a story about being in a church praying. You're always observing what you do. I noticed that when I was young going to parties. I could never lose myself...because I was always observing...observing or creating a mental scenario."
Francis Ford Coppola // "You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost."
George Orwell // "It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important. What counts is that we don’t betray each other."
Clarice Lispector // "It's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand."
Leo Tolstoy // "Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it's only here that the new and the good begins."
Saul Leiter // "I have a deep-seated distrust and even contempt for people who are driven by ambition to conquer the world...those who cannot control themselves and produce vast amounts of crap that no one cares about. I find it unattractive. I like the Zen artists: they’d do some work, and then they’d stop for a while."
Gertrude Stein // "Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening...like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup."
Salvador Dali // "One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams."
Tom Waits // "I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else’s. That’s a difficult statement to live up to, but then I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there."