Charles Bukowski // "In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see...and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives... In my writing I do not always agree with what occurs, nor do I linger in the mud for the sheer sake of it. Also, it is curious that the people who rail against my work seem to overlook the sections of it which entail joy and love and hope, and there are such sections. My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist I would be a liar. Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist. I am not dismayed that one of my books has been hunted down and dislodged from the shelves of a local library. In a sense, I am honored that I have written something that has awakened these from their non-ponderous depths. But I am hurt, yes, when somebody else's book is censored, for that book, usually is a great book and there are few of those, and throughout the ages that type of book has often generated into a classic, and what was once thought shocking and immoral is now required reading at many of our universities. I am not saying that my book is one of those, but I am saying that in our time, at this moment when any moment may be the last for many of us, it's damned galling and impossibly sad that we still have among us the small, bitter people, the witch-hunters and the declaimers against reality. Yet, these too belong with us, they are part of the whole, and if I haven't written about them, I should, maybe have here, and that's enough. May we all get better together."
Kendrick Lamar // "What separated me...is the fact that I didn't get caught inside the reality. I was always dreaming about doing something else or going somewhere else."
George Carlin // "People say, 'I'm going to sleep now,' as if it were nothing. But it's really a bizarre activity. For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I'm going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life."
David Lynch // "New mysteries. New day. Fresh doughnuts."
Romy Schneider // "I want to learn, I want to develop, I want to discover all that is in me."
Philippe Petit // "There is a child inside me that wants to come out and do something to surprise all the adults."
Oscar Wilde // "I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."
Heath Ledger // "No amount of money changes what I do between 'action' and 'cut'... It's not that I don’t want the money, it's just that...I never had money, and I was very happy without it. When I die, my money's not gonna come with me. My movies will live on for people to judge what I was as a person. I just want to stay curious."
Salvador Dali // "What wonderful things is this Salvador Dali going to accomplish today?"
Muhammad Ali // "Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion... Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing."
Patti Smith // "Pinocchio went out into the world. He went on his road filled with good intentions, with a vision. He went ready to do all the things he dreamed, but he was pulled this way and that. He was distracted. He faltered. He made mistakes. But he kept on. Pinocchio, in the end, became himself — because the little flame inside him, no matter what crap he went through, would not be extinguished. We are all Pinocchio. And do you know what I found after several decades of life? We are Pinocchio over and over again — we achieve our goal, we become a level of ourselves, and then we want to go further. And we make new mistakes, and we have new hardships, but we prevail. We are human. We are alive."
Keith Richards // "A painter's got a canvas. The writer's got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence."
Ernest Hemingway // "There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them, the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."
Audrey Hepburn // "People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed. Never throw out anyone."
Martin Luther King Jr. // "The trouble isn't so much that our scientific genius lags behind, but our moral genius lags behind. The great problem facing modern man is that...the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live... The problem is with man himself and man's soul. We haven't learned how to be just and honest and kind and true and loving...that is the real basis of our problem."
John Steinbeck // "In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty, men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love."
Ringo Starr // "I'd like to end up sort of...unforgettable."
Diana Vreeland // "The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it."
Pablo Picasso // "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible."
Greta Gerwig // "Sitting and waiting is such an awful way to live... Creating projects is really what’s happening these days. The chance to participate in your own career is a lot more exciting than just hoping that it all works out."
Zadie Smith // "To my mind, a true 'Creative' should not simply seek to satisfy a pre-existing demand but instead transform our notion of what it is we want... A genuinely creative piece of work always declines to see the world as others see it, or as it is commonly described... Sometimes this forced change of perspective provokes delight, and a Creative should count herself extremely lucky if that turns out to be the case. But she should also prepare herself for the more usual reactions: discomfort, distaste, confusion, shock — even anger. The genuinely new rarely slips easily into the world-as-it-is. It causes at least a little friction."
David Bowie // "I'm not sure whether it is me changing my mind, or whether I lie a lot. It's somewhere between the two. I don't exactly lie... People are always throwing things at me that I've said and I say that I didn't mean anything. You can't stand still on one point for your entire life."
Haruki Murakami // "This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time."
Simone de Beauvoir // "The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power."