Andrei Tarkovsky // "The director's task is to recreate life: its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen...even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable... All debate about what may or may not be shown can only be a pedestrian and immoral attempt to distort the truth. Dostoyevsky said: 'They always say that art has to reflect life and all that. But it's nonsense: the writer, the poet himself creates life such as it has never quite been before him.' The artist's inspiration comes into being somewhere in the deepest recesses of his 'I'. It cannot be dictated by external, 'business' considerations. It is bound to be related to his psyche and his conscience; it springs from the totality of his world-view. If it is anything less, then it is doomed from the outset to be artistically void and sterile. It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas."
David Lynch // "Just slow things down and it becomes more beautiful."
Patti Smith // "The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation."
Alan Moore // "In order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding. You have to do these things completely and purely without fear, without desire. Because things that we do without lust of result are the purest actions we shall ever take."
Hunter S. Thompson // "I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles...a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other...that kept me going."
Thelonious Monk // "Play your own way. Don't play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you're doing...even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years."
Hayao Miyazaki // "It is the fate of modern life that we repeatedly lose touch with nature, the environment, the planet. But we try to regain it again and again."
Haruki Murakami // "We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases."
Philip Glass // "A new language requires a new technique. If what you're saying doesn't require a new language, then what you're saying probably isn't new."
Maya Angelou // "Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure...and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed."
Joan Didion // "Self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself; no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through ones’ marked cards the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others... However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves... Self-respect...has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation... People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve... Self-respect is...a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.... Self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth."
John Cassavetes // "The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to... As an artist, I feel that we must try many things...but above all, we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad...to be willing to risk everything...to really express it all."
