Bob Dylan // "I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else."
Jack Kerouac // "Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream."
Joan Didion // "I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel... These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them...I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of life."
James Baldwin // "The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people."
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."
David Bowie // "All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it."
Jean-Luc Godard // "He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch."
Diane Keaton // "I don’t consider myself an expert on acting. For me its seduction has always come from the intensely romantic encounters I’ve shared with other actors... I shared moments with them that will last in a way my life can’t… When I find myself in the absurd position of sitting in the director’s chair…I try to leave the actors alone as much as possible. I try not to burden the atmosphere with a lot of talk... To me, endless self-involved talk kills impulse. I like to think that as a director I create an atmosphere of trust and, most important, play… I remember a few directors who tried to stampede my impulses. As much as I tried to fit their cookie-cutter mold, it didn’t work. They weren’t happy, and neither was I. Their demands struck me as completely unrealistic, because they didn’t include what I could actually give. Their 'concept' had been written in stone long before I entered the picture. I find this kind of directing lacking in humanity. It excludes a kind of graceful appreciation of the fact that life doesn’t rigidly conform to one’s desires… I didn’t respond well to that sort of pushing. On the other hand, I have appreciated directors who are genuinely interested in me…including my flaws; directors who looked forward to witnessing whatever spontaneity I had to offer, while guiding me gently. I believe my job as the director is to listen, to laugh, to empathize, to encourage and to be deeply moved by what I hope will be deeply moving performances. My job is to know when the actors are telling the truth, feeling the truth, living the truth…their truth. My job is to make it clear how much I am rooting for them in their effort to find a way, a process, a skill, that unlocks and frees them into giving the audience all their accumulated experiences and insights and feelings… I believe all actors want to go further in the exploration of what it is to be a human being. That’s what makes them so irresistible. I believe it’s amazing to have the courage to try to explore the mystery of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes… I am thrilled when they transport me out of reality. I am excited by their possibilities."
David Thewlis // "Do you think that the amoeba ever dreamed that it would evolve into the frog? Of course it didn’t. And when that first frog shimmied out of the water and employed its vocal chords in order to attract a mate or to retard a predator, do you think that that frog ever imagined that that incipient croak would evolve into all the languages of the world, into all the literature of the world? Of course it fucking didn’t. And just as that froggy could never possibly have conceived of Shakespeare, so we can never possibly imagine our destiny."
Ernest Hemingway // "When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out, know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice."
Zadie Smith // "I think the hardest thing for anyone is accepting that other people are real as you are. That’s it. Not using them as tools, not using them as examples or things to make yourself feel better or things to get over or under. Just accepting that they are absolutely as real as you are."
Henry Miller // "The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem."