Joan Littlewood // "If we don't get lost, we'll never find a new route."
Mary Oliver // "Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness...an empathy...was necessary if the attention was to matter."
Marcel Proust // "My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing."
James Baldwin (& Nina Simone) // "In order to have a conversation with someone, you must reveal yourself."
Jack Kerouac // "I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end... Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born. The world you see is just a movie in your mind. Rocks don’t see it. Bless and sit down. Forgive and forget. Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now. That’s the story. That’s the message. Nobody understands it, nobody listens, they’re all running around like chickens with heads cut off. I will try to teach it but it will be in vain, s’why I’ll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes."
James Baldwin // "No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time."
Jean Renoir // "All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the filmmaker interests me more than the copy of an object."
Cicely Tyson // "I am not a quitter. I will fight until I drop. It is just a matter of having some faith in the fact that as long as you are able to draw breath in the universe, you have a chance."
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."