Bill Watterson // "If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I bet they would live a lot differently."
Nina Simone // "I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why."
Henri Matisse // "The artist must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child."
Andrei Tarkovsky // "Before defining art, or any concept, we must answer a far broader question: What's the meaning of man's life on Earth? Maybe we are here to enhance ourselves spiritually. If our life tends to this spiritual enrichment, then art is a means to get there. This, of course, is in accordance with my definition of life. Art should help man in this process. Some say that art helps man to know the world like any other intellectual activity. I don't believe in this possibility of knowing, I am almost an Agnostic. Knowledge distracts us from our main purpose in life. The more we know, the less we know: getting deeper, our horizon becomes narrower. Art enriches man's own spiritual capabilities and he can then rise above himself to use what we call 'free will.'"
Henry Miller // "One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things."
Albert Camus // "Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."
Alan Watts // "You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean."
Pina Bausch // "I’m searching for...the right images. And I have no words for that. But I know right away when I’ve got it. If I say, it will be like this, it would limit it somehow. I like very much to be completely open, and allow things to happen."
Toni Morrison // "Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be."
Isaac Asimov // "As computers take over more and more of the work that human beings shouldn’t be doing in the first place…because it doesn’t utilize their brains, it stifles and bores them to death…there’s going to be nothing left for human beings to do but the more creative types of endeavor. The only way we can indulge in the more creative types of endeavor is to have brains that aim at that from the start. You can’t take a human being and put him to work at a job that underuses the brain and keep him working at it for decades and decades, and then say, 'Well, that job isn’t there, go do something more creative.' You have beaten the creativity out of him. But if from the start children are educated into appreciating their own creativity, then probably almost all of us can be creative. In the olden days, very few people could read and write. Literacy was a very novel sort of thing, and it was felt that most people just didn’t have it in them. But with mass education, it turned out that most people could be taught to read and write."
Bob Dylan // "An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you'll sort of be alright."
Frida Kahlo // "I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of 'madness.' Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love, and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like…they would all say: 'Poor thing, she’s crazy!' …I would build my own world, which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds… My madness would not be an escape from 'reality.'"