NITCH

Ernest Hemingway // "We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright."

Patti Smith // "Sometimes you're doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards and you have to rebuild it. It's not like you get to a point where you're all right for the rest of your life."

Anaïs Nin // "To dwell so much on the disintegration of passion when tested by human reality is merely to assert that death ultimately triumphs over our bodies, but this does not mean that we should refuse to live or love. These philosophers discount the duration of the passion, its euphorias and ecstasies, to observe only its dissolution. If we are unable to make passion a relationship of duration, surviving the destruction and erosions of daily life, it still does not divest passion of its power to transform, transfigure, transmute a human being from a rather limited, petty, fearful creature to a magnificent figure reaching at moments the status of a myth… What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion, but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life, that it is in this way that poetry becomes the greatest truth, by intensification, condensation of experience. While poetry is considered by most as illusion and delusion, it is the only reality, the moment when we are completely alive."

Hayao Miyazaki // "In order to grow...you must betray their expectations."

Pelé // "From my point of view, what's beautiful in the sport is that you don't need to know too much about tactics or anything to see. If you find something beautiful, you don't need to be an expert to know it. It's like ballet… The reason it was nicknamed 'ginga' was that normally, when we'd play against a European team…back then, the European teams were very tough and physical. They were big, and defensively solid... There were some in Brazil who thought we should make that our football culture. We would say, 'We want to dance. We want to ginga. Football is not about fighting to the death. You have to play beautifully.' And so we did, and that's the reason that Brazil created more of a show, more of a ballet… The ambition should always be to play an elegant game."

Vivienne Westwood // "You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people."

Jackson Pollock // "Something in me knows where I’m going."

James Baldwin // "Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world."

Jack Kerouac // "I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever... I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing… There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born… The world you see is just a movie in your mind. Rocks don’t see it. Bless and sit down. Forgive and forget. Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now. That’s the story. That’s the message. Nobody understands it, nobody listens, they’re all running around like chickens with heads cut off. I will try to teach it but it will be in vain, s’why I’ll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes."

Audrey Hepburn // "I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it."

Charles Bukowski // "I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. If I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. But literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate… I don’t like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it. Poetry does seem to be getting better, more human…but writing’s one thing, life’s another, we seem to have improved the writing a bit but life (ours and theirs) doesn’t seem to be improving very much. Maybe if we write well enough and live a little better life will improve a bit just out of shame. Maybe the artists haven’t been powerful enough, maybe the politicians, the generals, the judges, the priests…the businessmen have been too strong? I don’t like that thought but when I look at our pale and precious artists, past and present, it does seem possible… What I’m saying is that art hasn’t improved life like it should, maybe because it has been too private?… You write me now that the man in the cell next to yours didn’t like my punctuation the placement of my commas…and also the way I digress in order to say something precisely. Ah, he doesn’t realize the intent which is to loosen up, humanize, relax and still make as real as possible the word on the page... An artist can wander and still maintain essential form. Dostoevsky did it. He usually told 3 or 4 stories on the side while telling the one in the center... Bach taught us how to lay one melody down on top of another and another melody on top of that... Don’t let the form-and-rule boys like that guy in the cell next to you put one over on you. Just hand him a copy of Time or Newsweek and he’ll be happy… You’re doing 19 and 1/2 years I’ve been writing about 40. We all go on with our things. We all go on with our lives. We all write badly at times or live badly at times. We all have bad days and nights. I ought to send the guy in the cell next to yours The Collected Works of Robert Browning for Christmas, that’d give him the form he’s looking for…have I placed the commas here properly, Abbott?"

Henry Miller // "I do not believe in words, no matter if strung together by the most skillful man: I believe in language, which is something beyond words, something which words give only an adequate illusion of… Talk is only a pretext for other, subtler forms of communication... If two people are intent upon communicating with one another it doesn’t matter in the least how bewildering the talk becomes. People who insist upon clarity and logic often fail in making themselves understood. They are always searching for a more perfect transmitter, deluded by the supposition that the mind is the only instrument for the exchange of thought. When one really begins to talk one delivers himself. Words are thrown about recklessly, not counted like pennies. One doesn’t care about grammatical or factual errors, contradictions, lies and so on. One talks. If you are talking to some one who knows how to listen he understands perfectly, even though the words make no sense."