Toni Morrison // "I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls...he asks, 'How are you?' And instead of 'Oh, fine...and you?', I blurt out the truth: 'Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything...I’ve never felt this way before…' I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: 'No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work...not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job.' I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed... This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."
Bill Evans // "I think some young people want a deeper experience. Some people just wanna be hit over the head and, you know, if then they get hit hard enough maybe they'll feel something. You know? But some people want to get inside of something and discover, maybe, more richness. And I think it will always be the same; they're not going to be the great percentage of the people. A great percentage of the people don't want a challenge. They want something to be done to them...they don't want to participate. But there'll always be maybe 15% maybe, 15%, that desire something more, and they'll search it out...and maybe that's where art is, I think."
Vincent van Gogh // "What am I in the eyes of most people...a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person...somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then...even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition...based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me."
Jonas Mekas // "I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade... Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I’ve seen recently...they have already faded... Everything that I see, or read, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors... With me, everything is mood, mood, or else...simply nothingness."
Patti Smith // "I believe that we, this planet, hasn't seen its golden age. Everybody says it's finished...art's finished, rock and roll is dead...fuck that! This is my chance in the world. I didn't live back there in Mesopotamia. I wasn't there in the Garden of Eden. I wasn't there with Emperor Han. I'm here right now and I want now to be the golden age... If only every generation would realize that the time for greatness is right now when they're alive...the time to flower is now."
Carl Jung // "The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble... They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This 'outgrowing', as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency."
Ethan Hawke // "She and I were giving each other the only thing we truly have to offer: our time. We were going to give each other the living minutes of our life."
Jean-Luc Godard // "I'm not hungry. I want to see a film. Goodbye."
George Harrison // "I fell in love, not with anything or anybody in particular but with everything."
David Thewlis // "Evolution isn't over. Man isn't the be-all and fucking end-all. Look, if you take the whole of time, represented by one year...we're only in the first few moments of the first of January. There's a long way to go. Only now we're not gonna sprout extra limbs and wings and fins...because evolution itself is evolving."
Björk // "It takes a long time to fully become who you are."
Federico Fellini // "One of the greatest handicaps is to fear a mistake. You have stopped yourself. You have to move freely into the arena, not just to wait for the perfect situation, the perfect moment... If you have to make a mistake, it's better to make a mistake of action than one of inaction."
