Maya Angelou // "When I’m writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we’re capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I’m trying for that. But I’m also trying for the language. I’m trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for what it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and the delicacies of our existence."
Lawrence Ferlinghetti // "I wish to descend in the social scale. High society is low society. I am a social climber climbing downward. And the descent is difficult."
Yohji Yamamoto // "Identity...the word itself gives me shivers. It rings of calm, comfort, contentedness. What is it, identity? To know where you belong? To know your self worth? To know who you are? How do you recognize identity? We are creating an image of ourselves. We are attempting to resemble this image...is that what we call identity? The accord between the image we have created of ourselves and...ourselves. Just who is it, ourselves?"
Jonas Mekas // "In a meadow full of flowers you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry of life."
Nina Simone // "I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear."
Carrie Mae Weems // "If you get out of the way of your work, your work will tell you exactly what it needs. Usually your work is much more forward-thinking than you are. Half of what we do, we're doing almost intuitively. It's later that we really understand what we've actually done or why we've done something a certain way."
Albert Camus // "Humans are creatures, who spent their lives trying to convince themselves, that their existence is not absurd."
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."