Krzysztof Kieslowski // "At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see my movie. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really...that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, making thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it."
Tennessee Williams // "The fact that we continue to fall in love with people and ideas and places is not evidence of our cupidity or our dumbness, but our strength. When we love…really love…in any way, we are announcing to the world that we intend to survive."
John Muir // "The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like radiant heat."
Anthony Bourdain // "Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom...is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go."
Angelo Badalamenti // "I always have one major question…what do you want your audience to feel? Do you want to scare the shit out of them? Squirm in their seat? Feel beautiful? And how they answer that question gives me cues to work on. I translate their words into music."
Claude Monet // "The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute."
Joan Didion // "See enough and write it down, I tell myself. And then some morning, when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I’m going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do… On that bankrupt morning, I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest. Paid passage back to the world out there. It all comes back. Remember what it is to be me."
Simone Weil // "This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication… Every separation is a link."
Auguste Rodin // "The more simple we are, the more complete we become."
Stephen Fry // "Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it…that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing…an actor, a writer…I am a person who does things…I write, I act…and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun."
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."
Virginia Woolf // "Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm... What rhythm is...goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it."
