Philip Guston // "It doesn't occur to many viewers that the artist often has difficulty accepting the painting himself. You can't assume that I gloried in it, or celebrated it. I didn't. I'm a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over. I know I won't remember detail, but I will remember the feeling of the whole thing. I come into the studio very fearfully, I creep in to see what happened the night before. And the feeling is one of, 'My God, did I do that?' That is about the only measure I have. The kind of shaking, trembling of...'That's me? I did that?'"
Martha Graham // "There is a vitality, a life force, an energy...that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist... The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."
Pablo Picasso // "It takes a long time to become young."
Jack Kerouac // "Pain or love or danger makes you real again."
Tennessee Williams // "I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now."
W. H. Auden // "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand."
Anais Nin // "We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."
Anton Chekhov // "Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be."
Jorge Luis Borges // "For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't."
Charles Bukowski // "I get many phonecalls now. They are all alike. 'Are you Charles Bukowski, the writer?' 'Yes,' I tell them. And they tell me that they understand my writing, and some of them are writers or want to be writers and they have dull and horrible jobs and they can't face the room, the apartment, the walls that night...they want somebody to talk to, and they can't believe that I can't help them, that I don't know the words. They can't believe that often now I double up in my room, grab my gut and say 'Jesus Jesus Jesus, not again!' They can't believe that the loveless people, the streets, the loneliness, the walls are mine too. And when I hang up the phone they think I have held back my secret. I don't write out of knowledge. When the phone rings, I too would like to hear words that might ease some of this. That's why my number's listed."
Thelonious Monk // "The loudest noise in the world is silence."
René Daumal // "You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know."
