William S. Burroughs // "Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax..."
Patti Smith (& Robert Mapplethorpe) // "It's a dark period now... I think that true artists just have to keep doing their work, keep struggling, and keep hold of their vision. Because being a true artist is its own reward. If that's what you are, then you're always that. You could be locked away in a prison with no way at all to communicate what's in there, but you're still an artist. The imagination and the ability to transform is what makes one an artist. So young artists who feel overwhelmed by everything have to almost downscale. They have to go all the way to this kernel and believe in themselves, and that's what Robert gave me. He believed in that kernel I had, you know, with absolute unconditional belief. And if you believe it, you'll have that your whole life, through the worst times."
Anne Sexton // "Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth."
Keith Richards // "To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you."
Virginia Woolf // "It is poetry that I want now...long poems; I want the concentration, and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing."
David Lynch // "Life is filled with abstractions and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution. It’s emotion and intellect going together."
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."