Charles Bukowski // "Understand me...I do not have time for things that have no soul."
Sonny Rollins // "I want to be connecting with the subconscious, if I can call it that…there are not too many words to describe the real deep inner part of a human being… I want to be at that place where everything is blotted out and where creativity happens, and to get there I practice…I’m a prolific practicer, I still practice every day. You have to have the skills, then you want to not think when you’re playing, that’s when you let whatever deep level of creativity, spirituality, I mean, you know these words are so inadequate these days, but you want to get to this place where they exist."
Thelonious Monk // "Play your own way. Don't play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you're doing...even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years."
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."