NITCH

Photo of Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller // "I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget."

Photo of Albert Camus

Albert Camus // "I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If...I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from."

Photo of Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson // "When the cold eye of history looks back on Richard Nixon’s...years of unrestrained power in the White House, it will show that he had the same effect on conservative/Republican politics as Charles Manson and the Hells Angels had on hippies and flower power...and the ultimate damage, on both fronts, will prove out to be just about equal. Or maybe not...at least not on the scale of sheer numbers of people affected. In retrospect, the grisly violence of the Manson/Angels trips affected very few people directly, while the greedy, fantastic incompetence of Richard Nixon’s Presidency will leave scars on the minds and lives of a whole generation...his supporters and political allies no less than his opponents."

Photo of Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki // "In my grandparents' time, it was believed that spirits existed everywhere...in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything... I like the idea that we should all treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything."

Photo of Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison // "A man searching for paradise lost can seem a fool to those who never sought the other world."

Photo of Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston // "There are years that ask questions and years that answer."

Photo of Rumer Godden

Rumer Godden // "There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person."

Photo of Jeff Buckley

Jeff Buckley // "The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It’s worth being bashed against. It’s worth getting scarred by. It’s worth pouring yourself over every one of its hot coals."

Photo of MF DOOM

MF DOOM // "Like a complex joke, something that has multiple ways of looking at it. You have to go the extra mile to use a technique like that in your writing. When you’re looking at quality of wordplay, you’re looking at, how many words repeat in a bar, or two bars? How many syllables can you use that still make sense in a song? In certain ways, you get a triple word score. You know how in Scrabble, you have triple word score...the way you get points based on words, and how they correlate on the board? It’s similar to getting points like that, if you really take it to the next level. What I’m looking at is the quality of the rhyming word: phonetically, how the tone is, in the pronunciation of the word... How many references can you cross and still stay on topic? And still rhyme? The more complex the subject matter and wordplay is, that’s where you get your points... Say you’re speaking from a point of view where you’re talking to yourself, in maybe a sad mood. How do your tones come across? Can people feel what you’re saying? Can they hear what you’re saying? Are you well pronounced? Maybe you purposely were a little bit sloppy with it, to bring the point across... It’s like gymnastics on paper."

Photo of David Lynch

David Lynch // "Okay, let’s try that again, but this time good."

Photo of Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy // "Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality', trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."

Photo of Jack Kerouac

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."