Philippe Petit // "I found out that total creativity involves a certain intellectual rebellion...not to become a criminal, but...you have to do things that are a little bit forbidden. You have to feel free."
David Lynch // "Inside, we are ageless...and when we talk to ourselves, it's the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It's the body that is changing around that ageless center."
Carl Jung // "Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is 'man' in a higher sense...he is 'collective man,' one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind… In his capacity as an artist...he is objective and impersonal...even inhuman...for as an artist he is his work, and not a human being… On one side he is a human being with a personal life, while in the other side he is an impersonal, creative process… The secret of artistic creation and of the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to the state of 'participation mystique'...to that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual, at which the weal or woe of the single human being does not count, but only human existence. This is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, but none the less profoundly moves us each and all. And this is also why the personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to his art...but at most a help or hindrance to his creative task."
Agnes Varda // "If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes."
Peter Tosh // "Everyone's trying to reach the top. Tell me how far is it from the bottom."
Ruth Asawa // "When you put a seed in the ground, it doesn't stop growing after eight hours. It keeps going every minute that it's in the earth. We, too, need to keep growing every moment of every day that we are on this earth."
Charles Bukowski // "I have been alone but seldom lonely. I have satisfied my thirst at the well of my self and that wine was good, the best I ever had, and tonight sitting staring into the dark I now finally understand the dark and the light and everything in between. Peace of mind and heart arrives when we accept what is: having been born into this strange life we must accept the wasted gamble of our days and take some satisfaction in the pleasure of leaving it all behind. Cry not for me. Grieve not for me. Read what I’ve written then forget it all. Drink from the well of your self and begin again."
Jack Kerouac // "Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream."
Constantin Brancusi // "What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things...it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface."
Jean-Michel Basquiat // "I just looked at a lot of things. And that’s how I learnt about art, by looking at it."
James Baldwin // "This was the last time I ever saw my mother alive… The way I always see her is the way she used to be on a Sunday afternoon, say, when the old folks were talking after the big Sunday dinner. I always see her wearing pale blue. She'd be sitting on the sofa. And my father would be sitting in the easy chair, not far from her. And the living room would be full of church folks and relatives. There they sit, in chairs all around the living room, and the night is creeping up outside, but nobody knows it yet. You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes and you hear the street noises every now and again…but it's real quiet in the room. For a moment nobody's talking… And my mother rocks a little from the waist, and my father's eyes are closed. Everyone is looking at something a child can't see. For a minute they've forgotten the children. Maybe a kid is lying on the rug, half asleep. Maybe somebody's got a kid in his lap and is absent-mindedly stroking the lad's head. Maybe there's a kid, quiet and big-eyed, curled up in a big chair in the corner. The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead will never stop…will never die. He hopes that there will never come a time when the old folks won't be sitting around the living room, talking about where they've come from, and what they've seen, and what's happened to them and their kinfolk. But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won't talk any more that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he's moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It's what they've come from. It's what they endure. The child knows that they won't talk any more because if he knows too much about what's happened to them, he'll know too much too soon, about what's going to happen to him."
Brassaï // "My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary."