James Baldwin // "You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."
Jorge Luis Borges // "For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't."
Virginia Woolf // "Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm... What rhythm is...goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it."
Willem de Kooning // "You know the real world...this so-called real world...is something you put up with. Like everybody else. I'm in my element when I am a little bit out of this world."
Carl Sagan // "We invented phonetic writing so we could put our sounds down on paper and, by glancing at a page, hear someone speaking in our head – an invention that became so widespread in the last few thousand years that we hardly ever stop to consider how astonishing it is."
Simone de Beauvoir // "Every morning, even before I open my eyes, I know I am in my bedroom and my bed. But...sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement: why am I myself? What astonishes me...is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?"
DMX // "It’s a waste of energy to think about what somebody else is doing. I just do what I do...we’re coming around to a good space. Quietly, a good position. It goes in cycles...they’re not saying nothing. People ain’t saying nothing. They’re not feeding the people properly... The artists. It’s the same old bullshit. There has to be some fucking substance."
Sam Shepard // "Look it, you start out...and you’re full of defenses. You have all of this stuff to prove. You have all of these shields in front of you. All your weapons are out. It’s like you’re going into battle. You can accomplish a certain amount that way. But then you get to a point where you say, 'But there's this whole other territory I'm leaving out.' And you begin to see that you leave out so much when you go to battle with the shield... You can’t grow that way... There just comes a point when you have to...risk becoming more open to the vulnerable side, which I think is the female side. It’s much more courageous than the male side."
Daido Moriyama // "People often talk of home as a place where you are born, grow up and everyone is there. But I don’t have such a home. I’ve been moving a lot since I was a child. I am creating my own home by connecting pieces of images from my imagination."
Charles Bukowski // "I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on nothing ever did unless I caused it."
Kurt Vonnegut // "Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow... The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don’t show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward."
James Baldwin // “A great writer operates as an unimpeachable witness to one’s own experience; and one of the reasons that great writers are so rare...and their careers, in the main, so stormy...is that almost no one wishes to have his experience corroborated. I suppose that one of the reasons for this is that one’s actual experience cannot but assault one’s self-image, one’s aspirations, and one’s safety. We all attempt to live on the surface, where we assume we will be less lonely, whereas experience is of the depths and is dictated by what we really fear and hate and love as distinguished from what we think we ought to fear and hate and love."