Helen Frankenthaler // "I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate."
Joan Mitchell // "I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me...and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves with me."
Abbas Kiarostami // "I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame."
Timothy Leary // "The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance."
Hayao Miyazaki // "We have a word for that in Japanese. It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally. (claps hands) The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building…can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension all the time you just get numb… What really matters is the underlying emotions…that you never let go of those."
Henry Miller // "To make living itself an art, that is the goal."
Henri Cartier-Bresson // "For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving."
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."