Tracey Emin // "I gave up painting, I gave up art, I gave up believing, I gave up faith. I had what I called my emotional suicide, I gave up a lot of friendships with people, I just gave up believing in life really and it’s taken me years to actually start loving and believing again. I realized that there was a greater idea of creativity. Greater than anything I could make just with my mind or with my hands, I realized there was something…the essence of creativity, that moment of conception, the whole importance, the whole being of everything and I realized that if I was going to make art it couldn’t be about…it couldn’t be about a fucking picture. It couldn’t be about something visual. It had to be about where it was really coming from."
John Coltrane // "There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror."
Jack Kerouac // "Sometimes I’d get mad because things didn’t work out so well, I’d spoil a flapjack, or slip in the snowfield while getting water, or one time my shovel went sailing down into the gorge, and I’d be so mad I’d want to bite the mountaintops and would come in the shack and kick the cupboard and hurt my toe. But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious."
Aldous Huxley // "It's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly... Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them...throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you...trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly...on tiptoes and no luggage...completely unencumbered."
Albert Camus // "The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind."
Jiddu Krishnamurti // "As the computer and the robot are taking over the activities of thought, we have only two choices. Either we pursue pleasure and entertainment, or we enter into the whole psychological world and see how far, how deeply we can go into it."
Penelope Cruz // "The preparation is like making a soup. You start throwing ingredients in...you move it around and just start to put in all of this information and the day you start shooting, you drink it. And then forget about it...you don’t have to be thinking about it, it’s just going to be in you and hopefully something real will come out of there. I believe in that. That preparation is the most important part."
Ernest Hemingway // "We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other."
Georgia O’Keeffe // "It's not enough to be nice in life. You’ve got to have nerve."
Carl Sagan // "The idea that our sense of self worth comes not from anything that we’ve done, not from anything worthy, but by an accident of birth, is where the crux of the humiliation is, in my opinion. I would say those of us worried about being demoted, those of us who wish for us to be important, should do something important. We should make an easily understandable, achievable, and inspiring goal for the human species, and then set out and do it. That would give us the confidence that we sorely lack by being dependent on our self esteem being based on nothing we do. We want to have self esteem? Let’s make a planet in which nobody is starving. Let’s make a planet in which men and women have equal access to power. Let us make a planet in which no ethnic group has it over another ethnic group. Let’s have a planet in which science and engineering is used for the benefit of everybody on the planet. And my personal idiosyncrasy, let’s have a world in which we go to other worlds."
James Baldwin // "Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death...ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return."
Andrei Tarkovsky // "I am interested above all in the character who is capable of sacrificing himself and his way of life...regardless of whether that sacrifice is made in the name of spiritual values, or for the sake of someone else, or of his own salvation, or of all these things together. Such behaviour precludes, by its very nature, all of those selfish interests that make up a 'normal' rationale for action; it refutes the laws of a materialistic world view. It is often absurd and unpractical. And yet...or indeed for that very reason...the man who acts in that way brings about fundamental changes to people’s lives and to the course of history. The space he lives in becomes a rare, distinctive point of contrast to the empirical concepts of our experience, an area where reality is all the more strongly present."
