Kurt Vonnegut // "I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the 'canary in the coal mine theory'... This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever."
David Foster Wallace // "If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched establishments...who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home... By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some diehard’s vote."
Keith Richards // "The strong guys are gentle, always. It's only the weak guys that come on strong."
Primo Levi // "Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions."
Katharine Hepburn // "As one goes through life, one learns that if you don't paddle your own canoe, you don't move."
Patti Smith // "I’m going to promote myself exactly as I am, with all my weak points and my strong ones. My weak points are that I'm self-conscious and often insecure, and my strong point is that I don't feel any shame about it."
James Baldwin // "Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free...he has set himself free...for higher dreams, for greater privileges."
David Lynch // "Inside, we are ageless...and when we talk to ourselves, it's the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It's the body that is changing around that ageless center."
Helen Mirren // "If I could give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to use the words ‘fuck off’ much more frequently."
Ralph Waldo Emerson // "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
Hunter S. Thompson // "A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance... You have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else... But you say, 'I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.' And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know...is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by deciding to look, you go a long way toward making the choice."
Bill Murray // "I didn't get into this position by being like a stiff sitting on the set in a folding chair. I did it by walking around on the streets and stirring things up."