Charles Bukowski // "Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art... Boxing can be art. Loving can be art. Opening a can of sardines can be an art... Not many have style. Not many can keep style... Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done."
Justin Jones // "No justice, no peace. I believe the roots of it lie in something Martin Luther King stated…that true peace is not merely the absence of tension, but it is the presence of justice. That is what I was saying. That until we act, there will be no peace in our communities."
Charles Bowden // "Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more."
Ryuichi Sakamoto // "I used to know things intellectually, but now I feel them."
Henry Miller // "Real awareness comes intermittently, in brief flashes of a second’s duration. The man who can hold it for a minute, relatively speaking, inevitably changes the whole trend of the world. In the span of ten or twenty thousand years a few widely isolated individuals have striven to break the deadlock, shatter the trance, as it were. Their efforts, if we look at the present state of the world superficially, seem to have been ineffectual. And yet the example which their lives afford us points conclusively to one thing…that the real drama of men on earth is concerned with Reality, and not with the creation of civilizations which permit the great mass of men to snore more or less blissfully… Men…know it intermittently, just as they know other things which they conveniently proceed to forget where there is danger of having their sleep disturbed… Man refuses to stay awake because if he did, he would be obliged to become something other than he now is, and the thought of that is apparently too painful for him to endure… If man were to come to grips with his real nature…he would become so exalted, or else so frightened, that he would find it impossible to go to sleep again. To live would be a perpetual challenge to create."
Charlie Chaplin // "Think of the power of the universe…turning the Earth, growing trees. That’s the same power within you...if you’ll only have the courage and the will to use it."
Leonard Cohen // "If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day."
Simone de Beauvoir // "I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way."
James Baldwin // "You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."
Anais Nin // "I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits."
Salvador Dali // "There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."
David Lynch // "I came from painting. And a painter has none of those worries. A painter paints a painting. No one comes in and says, 'You’ve got to change that blue.' It’s a joke to think that a film is going to mean anything if somebody else fiddles with it. If they give you the right to make the film, they owe you the right to make it the way you think it should be... The filmmaker decides on every single element, every single word, every single sound, every single thing going down that highway through time. Otherwise, it won’t hold together. When there’s even a little hint of pressure coming from someplace else…like deadlines or going over budget…this affects the film. You just want support, support, support…in a perfect world…so that you can really get the thing to be correct. Now, this doesn’t happen these days. So…you dive within and experience the self…pure consciousness…it’s the home of all the laws of nature. You get more in tune with those and…nature starts supporting you. So you have that feeling, even if they’re breathing down your neck, and there’s pressure here and pressure there, it doesn’t matter…inside. I say, 'Every day is like a Saturday morning.' You got a great feeling, and it grows and grows and grows. Then it becomes more like a game. Even when they come by…maybe to tell you for the twentieth time that you’ve gone over budget, you welcome them, and you love them, and you have a coffee with them. And they start relaxing. We’re supposed to all get along and we’re supposed to all have so much fun…just happy, our tails just wagging. It’s supposed to be great living, it’s supposed to be fantastic."