Bob Dylan // "My hangup was that I used to try to define beauty. Now I take it as it is, however it is. That’s why I like Hemingway. I don’t read much. Usually I read what people put in my hands. But I do read Hemingway. He didn’t have to use adjectives. He didn’t really have to define what he was saying. He just said it. I can’t do that yet, but that’s what I want to be able to do."
Werner Herzog // "I'm trying to find these rare moments where you feel completely illuminated. Facts never illuminate you. The phone directory of Manhattan doesn't illuminate you, although it has factually correct entries, millions of them. But these rare moments of illumination that you find when you read a great poem, you instantly know. You instantly feel this spark of illumination. You are almost stepping outside of yourself and you see something sublime."
Hayao Miyazaki // "It’s sunnier today. The world is as beautiful as ever."
Joni Mitchell // "Keep a good heart. That's the most important thing in life. It's not how much money you make or what you can acquire. The art of it is to keep a good heart."
Marco Pierre White // "There are many times in my life, when I could’ve thrown in the towel. Many times in my life when I was on the floor...when you’re on the floor, never allow anybody to pick you up. It doesn’t matter how long you stay there, make sure you pick yourself up and dust yourself down...you take the knowledge from the experience and you grow."
Ernest Hemingway // "This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it."
Jack Kerouac // "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
Angela Davis // "I think that now we’re thinking deeply about the connection between interior life and what happens in the social world... Self-care and healing and attention to the body and the spiritual dimension...the process of living the way we want to live in the future. Embodying it. We have to imagine the kind of society we want to inhabit. We can’t simply assume that somehow, magically, we’re going to create a new society in which there will be new human beings. No, we have to begin that process of creating the society we want to inhabit right now... For a long time, activists did not necessarily think that it mattered to take care of themselves; in terms of what they eat, in terms of mental self care, spiritual self care… Personally, I started practicing yoga and meditation when I was in jail. But it was more of an individual practice; later I had to recognize the importance of emphasising the collective character of that work."
Ernst Haas // "If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?"
Bruce Lee // "In order to control myself, I must first accept myself, by going with and not against my nature."
Jeff Buckley // "My music is like a lowdown dreamy bit of the psyche. It’s part quagmire and part structure. The quagmire is important for things to grow in. Do you ever have one of those memories where you think you remember a taste or a feel of something, maybe an object, but the feeling is so bizarre and imperceptible that you just can’t quite get a hold of it? It drives you crazy. That’s my musical aesthetic, just this imperceptible fleeting memory."
Hunter S. Thompson // "Nixon, at least, was blessed with a mixture of arrogance and stupidity that caused him to blow the boilers almost immediately after taking command. By bringing in hundreds of thugs, fixers and fascists to run the Government, he was able to crank almost every problem he touched into a mindbending crisis... For now, we should make every effort to look at the bright side of the Nixon Administration. It has been a failure of such monumental proportions that political apathy is no longer considered fashionable, or even safe... The Watergate spectacle was a shock, but the fact of a millionaire President paying less income tax than most construction workers...and the threat of mass unemployment by spring tends to personalize Mr. Nixon's failures in visceral way... When the cold eye of history looks back on Richard Nixon's...years of unrestrained power in the White House, it will show that he had the same effect on conservative/Republican politics as Charles Manson and the Hells Angels had on hippies and flower power... Or maybe not...at least not on the scale of sheer numbers or people affected. In retrospect, the grisly violence of the Manson/Angels trips affected very few people directly, while the greedy, fascistic incompetence of Richard Nixon's Presidency will leave scars on the minds and lives of a whole generation...his supporters and political allies no less than his opponents. Maybe that's why the end of this incredible, fantastic year feels so hollow."