Salvador Dali // "Every one of my paintings, everybody laughed...but after 12 years, every scientific people recognize that every one of these paintings is a real prophecy. In the moment of painting my watches, a rigid object for everybody, I myself paint these watches very soft...everybody laughed. The last development of nuclear physics proved a new conception that space and time is completely flexible."
Arundhati Roy // "Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house...the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture...must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story."
Jack Kerouac // "There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go."
Stanley Kubrick // "Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism...and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong...and lucky...he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth... Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death...our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."
Henri Matisse // "The artist must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child."
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."