Bob Dylan // "I was doing it unconsciously. Then one day I was half-stepping, and the lights went out. And since that point, I more or less had amnesia. Now, you can take that statement as literally or metaphysically as you need to, but that’s what happened to me. It took me a long time to get to do consciously what I used to be able to do unconsciously. It happens to everybody. Think about the periods when people don’t do anything, or they lose it and have to regain it, or lose it and gain something else. So it’s taken me all this time, and the records I made along the way were like openers…trying to figure out whether it was this way or that way, just what is it, what’s the simplest way I can tell the story and make this feeling real. So now I’m connected back, and I don’t know how long I’ll be there because I don’t know how long I’m going to live. But what comes now is for real… Doing it unconsciously was doing it like a primitive, and it took everything out of me. Everything was gone, I was drained. I found out later that it was much wiser to do it consciously, and it could let things be much stronger, too. Actually, you might even live longer, but I’m not sure about that."
Amiri Baraka // "Hope is delicate suffering."
Robert Frank // "I am a hunter. I hunt for pictures. I’m not a verbal man. I have nothing to reveal. It’s all in the work, I hope."
Albert Schweitzer // "I do not want to frighten you by telling you about the temptations life will bring. Anyone who is healthy in spirit will overcome them. But there is something I want you to realize. It does not matter so much what you do. What matters is whether your soul is harmed by what you do. If your soul is harmed, something irreparable happens, the extent of which you won't realize until it will be too late."
Joni Mitchell // "Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth...we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side...and we become attracted to fluff... But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing."
Terence McKenna // "The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas. It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down…sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward."
Saul Bellow // "People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature."
Christian Bale // "I’ve got this love-hate thing with work. But I actually think the love-hate thing is quite a healthy thing to have. If all you do is love...then you’re just going to imitate what you love, right? It takes people to fucking hate it at the same time to make any sort of change to what they’re doing, you know? And to me, that’s when it becomes interesting."
Josef Albers (& Anni Albers) // "Learn to see and to feel life…because there are still marvels in the world, because life is a mystery and always will be. But be aware of it."
Raymond Carver // "It's possible…to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things…a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring…with immense, even startling power."
Chantal Akerman // "Today is Saturday and I’m going to make a film about laziness."
Virginia Woolf // "Go deeper, beneath what people said."
