Zadie Smith // "Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts."
Maya Angelou // "There were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this... So you watch yourself about complaining. What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it."
Frank Lloyd Wright // "We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means."
F. Scott Fitzgerald // "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight."
Andy Warhol // "Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, 'So what.' 'My mother didn't love me.' So what... 'I'm a success but I'm still alone.' So what. I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget."
Tom Waits (reading Charles Bukowski) // "Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness. Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them. You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it. You are marvelous. The gods wait to delight in you."
JK Rowling // "We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."
Albert Camus // "Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park... It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself... That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be."
Bob Dylan // "Boy, I hurried... I hurried for a long time. I'm sorry I did. All the time you're hurrying, you're not really as aware as you should be. You're trying to make things happen instead of just letting it happen. You follow me?"
Tennessee Williams // "I will read long books and the journals of dead writers. I will feel closer to them than I ever felt to people I used to know before I withdrew from the world. It will be sweet and cool this friendship of mine with dead poets, for I won’t have to touch them or answer their questions. They will talk to me and not expect me to answer. And I’ll get sleepy listening to their voices explaining the mysteries to me. I’ll fall asleep with the book still in my fingers, and it will rain."
Henry Miller // "To make living itself an art, that is the goal."
Christopher Walken // "I have this theory about words. There's a thousand ways to say 'Pass the salt.' It could mean...'Can I have some salt?' Or it could mean, 'I love you.' It could mean, 'I'm very annoyed with you.' Really, the list could go on and on. Words are little bombs, and they have a lot of energy inside them."