Sean Connery // "The main concern for an actor or a writer is...the removal of time, as I see it. Because I really think the only occasions you really are enjoying yourself...are when you don't know what time it is...when you're totally absorbed in a play, a film or a party and you don't know what time it is or how long it has been going on... When an artist can suspend time like that for an audience, he has succeeded...and that's what I've tried to achieve."
Zadie Smith // "The idea we're given of reading...is that I should sit here and I should be entertained. And the more classical model, that has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician sits at a piano, has a piece of music which is the work made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you... It takes all kinds of sensitivities...all kinds of different qualities to understand what is going on in that book, not just on the superficial level, its plot and character, but what it believes... And the complexity of that is a real education of the emotions and of the heart; and it's very hard to get that education elsewhere. Those procedures are vital. They're really important to becoming a human being. Becoming a human being isn't just something you get with your birth, it's an exercise and it takes your whole life."
Jim Harrison // "Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know."
Rick Rubin // "I never decide if an idea is good or bad until I try it. So much of what gets in the way of things is thinking that we know. And the more that we can remove any baggage we're carrying with us, and just be in the moment, use our ears, and pay attention to what's happening, and just listen to the inner voice that directs us, the better."
Marcel Marceau // "I don't want our youth to become anti-romantic. We have to make room for the soul."
Leonard Cohen // "You just want to indicate that curious thing that we call 'experience'... It's something in the voice itself. It indicates that the person has been through a life, that they have lived their life on the front line. And that's the sound we like...I like...to hear... It includes optimism. It includes despair. It includes regret. It includes so many things that you forget about all of them, and you just know that you're listening to a voice...a voice of experience."
David Bowie // "I wanted to express...a wish to destroy everything that we have ever created. When Nietzsche said 'God is dead,' it was a culmination of all the thoughts of the previous century...people were so aggrandized with their sense of science and the aftermath of the enlightenment and how man himself could improve the world. Then of course, it led to things like...Einstein’s discovery that time and space aren’t what we thought they were, and Freud in understanding another kind of human inside the human. All of these things culminated in the idea that everything we’ve known before was wrong. Everything. So we start the 20th century with this clean slate. We are now the Gods. And the greatest thing that we could do as God during that century was create the bomb. That was what we were good at doing. And I think that in itself...the repercussions of what we had done by standing in for this idea of morality, creating it all ourselves, so destroyed our fix on what we should be doing in life that we’re still living through that chaos right now. We have no spiritual lives to speak of...there is no direct sense of what our purpose is anymore. Now that may be a good thing because it may show itself to be that we, in fact, don’t have a purpose. Are we big enough or mature enough to exist like that? Are we mature enough to accept that there is no 'plan,' there is no 'going somewhere,' there is no gift of immortality at the end of this if we evolve... Maybe we have to exist and live on the idea that we have one day at a time to live...and can we do that? Because if we could do that, we may be serving some, really, some great thing."
John Lewis // "I have been beaten, my skull fractured, and arrested more than forty times so that each and every person has the right to register and vote. Friends of mine gave their lives. Do your part. Get out there and vote like you’ve never voted before."
Simone Weil // "Everybody knows that really intimate conversation is only possible between two or three. As soon as there are six or seven, collective language begins to dominate."
Max Ernst // "When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is...his only lasting achievement."
Francoise Sagan // "I always wanted to ask people: 'Are you in love? What are you reading?'"
James Baldwin // "It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be."