Zadie Smith // "I think the traditional 'feminine' arts of homemaking or dressmaking or whatever are shamefully undervalued. They’re doing what I’m doing: making a space for another person to be in. Creating an architecture for life. There’s no greater task but also no more mundane one."
Michel Foucault // "What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"
Charles Bukowski // "Ben phoned and said, 'There’s a rumor going around that you’re dead.' ...'Well,' I said, 'Maybe the dead can’t tell, maybe I’m dead...' 5 years ago somebody started it: 'Bukowski’s dead.' Now it’s beginning again. They want me dead very much. I seem to be very much on the mind of the death-wishers. It’s irritating to some that a man nearing sixty continues to write. It should give them some hope instead of rancor. I’ll die, my friends, I have no doubt of that. But I think that the history of our streets would have less ugly names if we could celebrate men’s lives also.'"
Miles Davis // "There’s no shortcut. I’m no accident. People like to say it’s natural. It’s not so. You have to practice and you have to study."
Hermann Hesse // "This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today...You must play your part and sing a song, one of your best."
Aldous Huxley // "Take the piano teacher...he always says, Relax, relax. But how can you relax while your fingers are rushing over the keys? Yet they have to relax. The singing teacher and the golf pro say exactly the same thing. And in the realm of spiritual exercises we find that the person who teaches mental prayer does too. We have somehow to combine relaxation with activity… The personal conscious self being a kind of small island in the midst of an enormous area of consciousness... What has to be relaxed is the personal self, the self that tries too hard, that thinks it knows what is what, that uses language. This has to be relaxed in order that the multiple powers at work within the deeper and wider self may come through and function as they should. In all psychophysical skills we have this curious fact of the law of reversed effort: the harder we try, the worse we do the thing."
Tove Jansson // "I want to show you cities and landscapes and teach you how to look at things in new ways and how to get along in places you don’t already know inside out. I want to put some life in you."
James Baldwin // "Quite unpredictable things happen when the bulk of the population attains what we think of as a high cultural level... And this, I think, is because the effort of a Schoenberg or a Picasso (or a William Faulkner or an Albert Camus) has nothing to do, at bottom, with physical comfort, or indeed with comfort of any other kind. But the aim of the people who rise to this high cultural level...is precisely comfort for the body and the mind. The artistic objects by which they are surrounded cannot possibly fulfill their original function of disturbing the peace...which is still the only method by which the mind can be improved...they bear witness instead to the attainment of a certain level of economic stability and a certain thin measure of sophistication. But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second."
Jean-Luc Godard // "He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch."
Brian Eno // "People...often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull's eye. Of course with everyone else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside."
Arthur Miller // "I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be...whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something."
Buckminster Fuller // "Evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite independently of man’s consciously attempting to bring them about... I remind you quickly that none of you is consciously routing the fish and potato you ate for lunch into this and that specific gland to make hair, skin, or anything like that. None of you are aware of how you came to grow from 7 pounds to 70 pounds and then to 170 pounds... All of this is automated, and always has been. There is a great deal that is automated regarding our total salvation on Earth, and I would like to get in that frame of mind right now in order to be useful in the short time we have."