Chuck Close // "The advice I like to give…is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."
Robert De Niro // "There is a mixture of anarchy and discipline in the way I work. The talent is in the choices."
John Malkovich // "Accomplishment may be the result of ambition or drive...I think I probably have lots of drive. But I don’t have any ambition. I never really had any... I don’t have a hugely high opinion of ambition. I think of ambition as the need to prove something to others, and the need to be recognized. A need for rewards outside of the work. Drive motivates you to do whatever it is you’re doing as well as you can. That’s an important distinction."
Ernest Hemingway // "Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times."
Samuel Beckett // "Perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either."
Xavier Corberó // "At first you actually believe that it will become exactly what you have conceived…or rather, imagined…and then you must do whatever it takes to make it happen. Of course, that’s when surprises take shape, because you have imagined one percent of what happens in the end."
Tove Jansson // "Strange that it will all just go on, we will paint, travel, love, grieve, collect money, buy things, grow old…whether we want to or not."
Zadie Smith // I think the hardest thing for anyone is accepting that other people are real as you are. That’s it. Not using them as tools, not using them as examples or things to make yourself feel better or things to get over or under. Just accepting that they are absolutely as real as you are."
Rene Magritte // "When we meet the unknown, we can believe we are out of place. But, in fact, I believe that we are reoriented."
Federico Garcia Lorca // "The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink…and in drinking understand themselves."
James Baldwin // "In my experience…and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word experience means…the strangest people in one's life are the people one has known and loved, still know and will always love. Here, both I and the vocabulary are both in trouble, for strangest does not imply stranger. A stranger is a stranger is a stranger, simply, and you watch the stranger to anticipate his next move. But the people who elicit from you a depth of attention and wonder which we helplessly call love are perpetually making moves which cannot possibly be anticipated. Eventually, you realize that it never occurred to you to anticipate their next move, not only because you couldn't but because you didn't have to: it was not a question of moving on the next move, but simply, of being present. Danger, true, you try to anticipate and you prepare yourself, without knowing it, to stand in the way of death. For the strangest people in the world are those people recognized, beneath one's senses, by one's soul…the people utterly indispensable for one's journey."
Ansel Adams // "Ask yourself: Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning? Remember: Every coincidence is potentially meaningful. How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world."
