Robert Frank // "When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice."
Sally Mann // "Certain moments in the creative process, moments when I am really seeing, are weirdly expansive, and I develop a hyper-attuned visual awareness, like the aura-ringed optical field before a migraine. Radiance coalesces about the landscape, rich in possibility, supercharged with something electric, insistent. Time slows down, becomes ecstatic."
Akira Kurosawa // "Dear Mr. Bergman, Please let me congratulate you upon your seventieth birthday. Your work deeply touches my heart every time I see it and I have learned a lot from your works and have been encouraged by them. I would like you to stay in good health to create more wonderful movies for us… In Japan, there was a great artist called Tessai Tomioka who lived in the Meiji Era (the late 19th century). This artist painted many excellent pictures while he was still young, and when he reached the age of eighty, he suddenly started painting pictures which were much superior to the previous ones, as if he were in magnificent bloom. Every time I see his paintings, I fully realize that a human is not really capable of creating really good works until he reaches eighty. A human is born a baby, becomes a boy, goes through youth, the prime of life and finally returns to being a baby before he closes his life. This is, in my opinion, the most ideal way of life. I believe you would agree that a human becomes capable of producing pure works, without any restrictions, in the days of his second babyhood. I am now seventy-seven years old and am convinced that my real work is just beginning. Let us hold out together…"
Joan Didion // "We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give...we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us... To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves...there lies the great singular power of self-respect."
Auguste Rodin // "Patience is also a form of action."
Elizabeth Bishop // "Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music…some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?"
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."