Bob Dylan // "I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down... I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I'd been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture. I was changing in other ways, too. Things that used to affect me, didn't affect me anymore. I wasn’t too concerned about people, their motives. I didn’t feel the need to examine every stranger that approached."
Andy Warhol // "I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own."
Hermann Hesse // "Great poets feel into the future with most sensitive antennas, and live out ahead of us, a piece of future development, and yet unrealized potential. Poets and philosophers, if they do not sell out to please, but have the courage to be themselves, represent the most precious and dangerous models a culture can have. They don't supply a ready-made set of duties and doctrines to be followed, but they show and teach the opposite: the path to individuality and personal conscience."
Joyce Carol Oates // "I oscillate between thinking I am crazy, and thinking I am not crazy enough."
Franz Kafka // "I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person."
Oscar Wilde // "A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want."
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."
Pina Bausch // "Repetition is not repetition. The same action makes you feel something completely different by the end."
Henry Miller // "The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don’t ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your petty life is of no concern to them. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that?"
Jack Kerouac // "Sometimes I’d get mad because things didn’t work out so well, I’d spoil a flapjack, or slip in the snowfield while getting water, or one time my shovel went sailing down into the gorge, and I’d be so mad I’d want to bite the mountaintops and would come in the shack and kick the cupboard and hurt my toe. But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious."
John Coltrane // "I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing...the emotional reaction is all that matters, as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood."
Ernest Hemingway // "That’s what dries a writer up…not listening. That is where it all comes from. Seeing, listening. You see well enough. But you stop listening… For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live. All right but if you write enough and as well as you can there will be the same amount of masterpiece material. You can’t think well enough to sit down and write a deliberate masterpiece… Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it…don’t cheat with it… All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is. Go on and write."
