David Hockney // "I don’t go out and see as much as I used to. I don’t feel the desperate need for it. I have to work things out myself, as it were. When you’re very young, you wish to be in the middle of a lot of activity because it’s stimulating to you. You are adding to it and taking out of it. But there’s a point in life where you don’t need that crowd to do it. You have enough in your head to sort out."
Simone Weil // "Everybody knows that really intimate conversation is only possible between two or three. As soon as there are six or seven, collective language begins to dominate."
William S. Burroughs // "Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don't make compromises, don't worry about making a bunch of money or being successful…be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency."
Max Roach // "My point is that we must decolonize our minds and re-name and re-define ourselves…we must re-define ourselves and our lives, in our own terms."
Walt Whitman // "Happiness…not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour."
Georgia O’Keeffe // "I said to myself, 'I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me…shapes and ideas so near to me…so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.' I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught."
Albert Camus // "The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning."
Mads Mikkelsen // "My approach to what I do in my job…and it might even be the approach to my life…is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference…because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something…a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important."
Renata Adler // "I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort."
Ryuichi Sakamoto // "Silence’s importance is increasing as I’m getting older…we need it for balance, to get our brains empty. Just eating information makes you unable to move."
Miles Davis // "I told them an artist's first responsibility was to himself. I said if he kept getting upset with what other people think he ought to do, he never would get too far, or he sure wouldn't last. I tried to make them see how I had worked all my life to play myself… They said they understood. I hope they did."
David Bowie // "It was a Zen teacher at a temple that I like a lot in Kyoto and he’s not often there…but we were fortunate enough to have lunch with him last time we were there. And it was most peculiar, out of nowhere he suddenly said, 'Religion is over and it lies in the arts.' That the spiritual life will be in the vessel of the visual and musical arts. Which I thought was quite a stunning comment coming from this 70-year-old Zen master… I think people are letting go of the idea of organized religion. I think, I can’t remember what the name of the philosopher was, but in the early part of the century he said that we have to kill God to reinvent him. And I think that is very much playing itself out in the later part of this century. I think we have to find the focus of where our religious strength lies in an entirely different area from the archaic and almost medieval forms that we’re sort of expected to supplant ourselves to… I think we’re finding the materials of a new religion but I think we have to find and develop a new kind of discipline. I think there is no real sense of purpose without a shaping of fragments. I think we have the fragments and the pieces of a new way, but I think we have to construct a path out of those pieces. I think we have the bits of concrete and it’s merely crazy paving at the moment but we have to develop a form. Presumably that’s what we’ll be doing in our new millennium, is developing the form. We have the material."