NITCH

Patti Smith // "We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves."

Bob Dylan // "I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down... I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I'd been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture. I was changing in other ways, too. Things that used to affect me, didn't affect me anymore. I wasn’t too concerned about people, their motives. I didn’t feel the need to examine every stranger that approached."

Steve Jobs // "Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them... If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, 'Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.' And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently."

Nina Simone // "My thing...what I hope to do all the time, is to be so completely myself...that my audiences, people who meet me, are confronted. They’re confronted with what I am, inside and out, as honest as I can be. And this way they have to see things about themselves, immediately."

Alejandro Jodorowsky // "Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness."

Ingmar Bergman // "I don't want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically... I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency."

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."