Edward Gorey // "All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important... You can describe all the externals of a performance...everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else."
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."
David Lynch // "We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination."
Saul Bellow // "I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction."
Anne Sexton // "Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen."
Maurice Ravel // "I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces."
Bob Dylan // "I had ambitions to set out and find…like an odyssey or going home somewhere…set out to find this home that I'd left a while back and couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn't really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so, I'm on my way home, you know?"
Wendell Berry // "It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey."
Jim Jarmusch // "All people are interesting, you just don't know it. You don't know if your bus driver might be a painter. Never judge what people are. The world has infinite mysteries and strange things. Be open to them."
Yukio Mishima // "What transforms this world is knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed."
Bob Dylan // "You have to know that you're the best whether anybody else tells you that or not. And that you'll be around, in one way or another, longer than anybody else. Somewhere inside of you, you have to believe that."
Leonard Cohen // "You live your life as if it’s real... The evidence accumulates that you’re not running the show. You still have to make choices as if you were running the show, but you make your choices with the intuitive understanding that it’s unfolding as it must... And if you can relax in that...if you can even touch it, or if it asserts itself from time to time, then the invincible defeat is transcended."