Frida Kahlo // "Everyone’s opinions about things change over time. Nothing is constant. Everything changes. And to hold onto some dogged idea forever is a little rigid and maybe naive."
Andrei Tarkovsky // "Art should be there to remind man that he is a spiritual being, that he is part of an infinitely larger spirit to which he will return in the end. If he’s interested in these questions, if he simply asks himself these questions, he’s already saved spiritually. It’s not the answer that’s important. I know that from the moment man begins asking the questions he will be unable to live as he has before."
Walt Whitman // "The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment...to put things down without deliberation...without worrying about their style...without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote, wrote, wrote… By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught."
William Klein // "Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work."
Charles Bukowski // "The young poets send their works to me, usually 3 or 4 very short poems. Some are fairly succinct, but they all lack the texture of madness and gamble, the inventiveness of the wild and trapped. There is a comfort there which disconcerts. Then there is the work of the street poets. Being on the skids, they should have some life advantages, they should not be debilitated by pretense. But they are full of it. Most of their output is about how they are not recognized, that the game is fixed, that they are truly the great ones and they go on about that, while writing little of anything else. Each week one or two little packets arrive from either the street poets or the comfortable poets. Kindness does not work with either type. Any response to their work begets more work plus their long letters expounding against the fates as if nobody but themselves ever had to deal with them. And if you fail to respond to that, in most cases, there will be follow-up letters which rail against your inhumanity: you too are against them, and, fuck you, buddy, you’ve lost it, you never had it, fuck you! I am not an editor. I never mailed my work to anybody but an editor. I never read my work to wives or girlfriends. These poets believe it’s all politics, an in-game, that some word from you will enable them to become renowned and famous. And that’s what they want. All that. And only that. The packets of poems keep arriving. If I were an editor I’d have to reject all of them. But I’m not. I write poems too. And when some of them come back and I reread them I usually feel that they should have come back. What you do is dig out and in, beat that keyboard so it yells and sings and laughs so well that the fix gets unfixed, that the god damned miracle arrives struck across the paper as you get up and walk across the room, your head buzzing, your guts wanting to fly through the ceiling. It’s the best fight, the last fight, the only one."
Bernie Sanders // "The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment. That’s what I mean by democratic socialism. So the next time you hear me attacked as a socialist...like tomorrow...remember this: I don't believe that government should take over the grocery store down the street or control the means of production. But I believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal."
Joan Didion // "I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be."
Leonard Cohen // "My pace and viewpoint is being influenced continually by things I come across... Occasionally we are touched by certain elaborate language, like the language we associate with the Elizabethan period, with the King James translation of The Bible, or Shakespeare. In certain moments you are influenced by very simple things. The instructions on a cereal package have a magnificent clarity. You’re touched by the writing in National Geographic...it represents a certain kind of accomplishment. Occasionally you move into another phase where you are touched by the writing of demented people or mental patients. I get a lot of letters from those kinds of writers. You begin to see it as the most accurate kind of reflection of your own reality, the landscape you’re operating on. There are many kinds of expression that I’m sensitive to."
David Lynch // "When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it’s almost like a crime. A film or a painting...each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language...it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose."
James Baldwin // "Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free...he has set himself free...for higher dreams, for greater privileges."
Hunter S. Thompson // "Well...the goddamn thing is over now; it ended on Thursday afternoon with all the grace and meaning of a Coke bottle thrown off a third-floor fire escape...exploding on the sidewalk and scaring the shit out of everybody in range, from the ones who got righteously ripped full of glass splinters to the swarm of 'innocent bystanders’ who still don’t know what happened... And probably never will; there is a weird, unsettled, painfully incomplete quality about the whole thing. All over Washington tonight is the stench of a massive psychic battle that nobody really won...even for me there is no real crank or elation in having been a front-row spectator at the final scenes, the Deathwatch... Looking back on the final few months of his presidency, it is easy to see that Nixon was doomed all along... On the...morning of Richard Milhous Nixon’s last breakfast in the White House I put on my swimming trunks and a red rain parka...and took an elevator down to the big pool below my window in the National Affairs Suite at the Washington Hilton. It was still raining... The lower lobby was empty, except for the night watchman... 'Mornin’, Doc,' said the watchman. 'Up a little early, ain’t you? Especially on a nasty day like this.' 'Nasty?' I replied...'Don’t you know who’s leaving town today?' He looked puzzled for a moment, then his face cracked into a grin. 'You’re right, by God! I almost forgot. We finally got rid of that man, didn’t we, Doc?' He nodded happily. 'Yes sir, we finally got rid of him.' I reached into my bag and opened two Bass ales. 'This is a time for celebration,' I said, handing him one of the bottles. I held mine out in front of me: 'To Richard Nixon,' I said. 'May he choke on the money he stole.' The watchman glanced furtively over his shoulder before lifting his ale for the toast. The clink of the two bottles coming together echoed briefly in the vast, deserted lobby. 'See you later,' I said. 'I have to meditate for a while, then hustle down to the White House to make sure he really leaves. I won’t believe it until I see it with my own eyes.'"
Martin Luther King Jr. // "We’ve left a lot of precious values behind...and if we are to go forward, if we are to make this a better world in which to live, we’ve got to go back... The first principle of value that we need to rediscover is this...that all reality hinges on moral foundations. In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe, just as abiding as the physical laws. I’m not so sure we all believe that. We never doubt that there are physical laws of the universe that we must obey. We never doubt that. And so we just don’t jump out of airplanes or jump off of high buildings...because we unconsciously know that there is a final law of gravitation, and if you disobey it you’ll suffer the consequences... Even if we don’t know it in its Newtonian formulation, we know it intuitively... But I’m not so sure if we know that there are moral laws, just as abiding as the physical law. I’m not so sure about that. I’m not so sure we really believe that there is a law of love in this universe, and that if you disobey it you’ll suffer the consequences... Now, at least two things convince me that we don’t believe that, that we have strayed away from the principle that this is a moral universe. The first thing is that we have adopted in the modern world a sort of a relativistic ethic... Most people can’t stand up for their convictions, because the majority of people might not be doing it... See, everybody’s not doing it, so it must be wrong. And, since everybody is doing it, it must be right... The other thing is that we have adopted a sort of a pragmatic test for right and wrong...whatever works is right. If it works, it’s all right... If you don’t get caught, it’s right. That’s the attitude, isn’t it? Just get by... My friends, that attitude is destroying the soul of our culture. It’s destroying our nation... We’ve got to know the simple disciplines, of being honest and loving and just with all humanity. If we don’t learn it, we will destroy ourselves, by the misuse of our own powers. This universe hinges on moral foundation."