Wes Anderson // "I have a way of filming things and staging them and designing sets. There were times when I thought I should change my approach, but in fact, this is what I like to do. It's sort of like my handwriting... And somewhere along the way, I think I've made the decision: I'm going to write in my own handwriting."
Charles Bukowski // "My life has hardly been pretty...the hospitals, the jails, the jobs, the women, the drinking. Some of my critics claim that I have deliberately inflicted myself with pain. I wish that some of my critics had been along with me for the journey. It’s true that I haven't always chosen easy situations but that's a hell of a long ways from saying that I leaped into the oven and locked the door. Hangover, the electric needle, bad booze, bad women, madness in small rooms, starvation in the land of plenty, god knows how I got so ugly, I guess it just comes from being slugged and slugged again and again, and not going down, still trying to think, to feel, still trying to put the butterfly back together again…it’s written a map on my face that nobody would ever want to hang on their wall. Sometimes I’ll see myself somewhere…suddenly…say in a large mirror in a supermarket…eyes like little mean bugs…face scarred, twisted, yes, I look insane, demented, what a mess…spilled vomit of skin…yet, when I see the 'handsome' men I think, my god my god, I’m glad I’m not them."
Benicio del Toro // "If you’re in a scene and you don’t know what you’re gonna do, don’t do anything...don’t do anything. Now it’s tricky not to do anything. It’s not as easy as not doing anything. There’s some weight that you have to find...not doing anything but being there. You gotta train your ear. You gotta listen. I’ve been in many scenes where I don’t say a word, and there’s other actors talking, and one thing that helped me ground myself was really listening to what they’re talking about. And then it looked like I was doing something but I wasn’t doing anything. I was listening."
David Lynch // "You don't know yourself by talking to yourself or looking in the mirror. You know yourself by diving in and experiencing the self."
Marilyn Monroe // "I restore myself when I'm alone. A career is born in public, talent in privacy."
Audrey Hepburn // "The greatest victory has been to be able to live with myself, to accept my shortcomings...I'm a long way from the human being I'd like to be. But I've decided I'm not so bad after all."
Bob Dylan // "You're going to die. You're going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we're just going to be gone. The world's going to go on without us... You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself, you decide for yourself."
Hermann Hesse // "Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap... Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard."
Robert S. Mueller III // "I would like to begin with integrity... Many of you have a career path in mind. Many of you have no idea where you will end up. A few of you may be surprised by where life takes you. I certainly was. In the end, it is not only what we do, but how we do it. Whatever we do, we must act with honesty and with integrity. Regardless of your chosen career, you are only as good as your word. You can be smart, aggressive, articulate, and indeed persuasive. But if you are not honest, your reputation will suffer. And once lost, a good reputation can never, ever be regained. As the saying goes: If you have integrity, nothing else matters. And if you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters."
James Dean // "Whatever’s inside making me what I am, it’s like film. Film only works in the dark. Tear it all open and let in the light and you kill it."
J.K. Rowling // "Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces...brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid."
Björk // "When I’m in nature, everything falls into place...I'm just one tiny piece of a big jigsaw puzzle...and I like that."