Ernest Hemingway // "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."
David Bowie // "I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying... I’m talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything that we can really envisage at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico, it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about... The idea that the piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it and add their own interpretation and what the piece of art is about is the grey space in the middle. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about."
Arthur Miller // "I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget."
Albert Camus // "I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If...I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from."
Hunter S. Thompson // "When the cold eye of history looks back on Richard Nixon’s...years of unrestrained power in the White House, it will show that he had the same effect on conservative/Republican politics as Charles Manson and the Hells Angels had on hippies and flower power...and the ultimate damage, on both fronts, will prove out to be just about equal. Or maybe not...at least not on the scale of sheer numbers of people affected. In retrospect, the grisly violence of the Manson/Angels trips affected very few people directly, while the greedy, fantastic incompetence of Richard Nixon’s Presidency will leave scars on the minds and lives of a whole generation...his supporters and political allies no less than his opponents."
Hayao Miyazaki // "In my grandparents' time, it was believed that spirits existed everywhere...in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything... I like the idea that we should all treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything."
Jim Morrison // "A man searching for paradise lost can seem a fool to those who never sought the other world."
Zora Neale Hurston // "There are years that ask questions and years that answer."
Rumer Godden // "There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person."
Jeff Buckley // "The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It’s worth being bashed against. It’s worth getting scarred by. It’s worth pouring yourself over every one of its hot coals."
MF DOOM // "Like a complex joke, something that has multiple ways of looking at it. You have to go the extra mile to use a technique like that in your writing. When you’re looking at quality of wordplay, you’re looking at, how many words repeat in a bar, or two bars? How many syllables can you use that still make sense in a song? In certain ways, you get a triple word score. You know how in Scrabble, you have triple word score...the way you get points based on words, and how they correlate on the board? It’s similar to getting points like that, if you really take it to the next level. What I’m looking at is the quality of the rhyming word: phonetically, how the tone is, in the pronunciation of the word... How many references can you cross and still stay on topic? And still rhyme? The more complex the subject matter and wordplay is, that’s where you get your points... Say you’re speaking from a point of view where you’re talking to yourself, in maybe a sad mood. How do your tones come across? Can people feel what you’re saying? Can they hear what you’re saying? Are you well pronounced? Maybe you purposely were a little bit sloppy with it, to bring the point across... It’s like gymnastics on paper."
David Lynch // "Okay, let’s try that again, but this time good."