Federico Fellini // "I became burdened…with useless baggage that I now want off my back. I want to uneducate myself of…worthless concepts, so that I may return to a virginal personality…to a rebirth of real intent and of real self. Then I won’t be lost in a collective whole that fits nobody because it’s made to fit everybody. Wherever I go, from the corner of my eye, I see…people moving in groups, like schools of fish… This is one of the things I fear more than anything else. I loathe collectivity. Man’s greatness and nobility consists in standing free of the mass. How he extricates himself from it is his own personal problem and private struggle."
Toni Morrison // "For me, success is not a public thing. It's a private thing. It's when you have fewer and fewer regrets."
André Gide // "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
Charles Bukowski // "And remember this: the page you are looking at now, I once typed the words with care with you in mind under a yellow light with the radio on."
Patti Smith // "No one expected me. Everything awaited me."
Carl Jung // "No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you."
James Baldwin (& Miles Davis) // "I told him I liked his music very much and he said something like, 'Are you sure?' He kind of smiled. Then he talked with me. Then we sort of knew each other… I could see that there was something in Miles and me which was very much alike... I don’t know what it is, can’t explain it, but I think it has something to do with extreme vulnerability."
Sylvia Plath // "What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that 'shaping' force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire... We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward."
Jack Nicholson // "I'd prefer if people had no impressions of me. As a kid, I had to tell my own family, 'Please, just don't talk about me!' Because they always got it wrong. Always. I just didn't want them to tell anyone anything about me."
Björk // "We go through changes roughly every three years, sometimes seven, where our colour palette changes and how we feel changes…the aroma or the textures…the lightness or darkness around us shifts."
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."
