Mads Mikkelsen // "My approach to what I do in my job…and it might even be the approach to my life…is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference…because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something…a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important."
Renata Adler // "I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort."
Ryuichi Sakamoto // "Silence’s importance is increasing as I’m getting older…we need it for balance, to get our brains empty. Just eating information makes you unable to move."
Miles Davis // "I told them an artist's first responsibility was to himself. I said if he kept getting upset with what other people think he ought to do, he never would get too far, or he sure wouldn't last. I tried to make them see how I had worked all my life to play myself… They said they understood. I hope they did."
David Bowie // "It was a Zen teacher at a temple that I like a lot in Kyoto and he’s not often there…but we were fortunate enough to have lunch with him last time we were there. And it was most peculiar, out of nowhere he suddenly said, 'Religion is over and it lies in the arts.' That the spiritual life will be in the vessel of the visual and musical arts. Which I thought was quite a stunning comment coming from this 70-year-old Zen master… I think people are letting go of the idea of organized religion. I think, I can’t remember what the name of the philosopher was, but in the early part of the century he said that we have to kill God to reinvent him. And I think that is very much playing itself out in the later part of this century. I think we have to find the focus of where our religious strength lies in an entirely different area from the archaic and almost medieval forms that we’re sort of expected to supplant ourselves to… I think we’re finding the materials of a new religion but I think we have to find and develop a new kind of discipline. I think there is no real sense of purpose without a shaping of fragments. I think we have the fragments and the pieces of a new way, but I think we have to construct a path out of those pieces. I think we have the bits of concrete and it’s merely crazy paving at the moment but we have to develop a form. Presumably that’s what we’ll be doing in our new millennium, is developing the form. We have the material."
Virginia Woolf // "Month by month things are losing their hardness; even my body now lets the light through; my spine is soft like wax near the flame of a candle. I dream; I dream."
Thich Nhat Hanh // "This body of mine will disintegrate, but my actions will continue me. In my daily life, I always practice to see my continuation all around me. We don’t need to wait until the total dissolution of this body to continue…we continue in every moment. If you think that I am only this body, then you have not truly seen me. When you look at my friends, you see my continuation. When you see someone walking with mindfulness and compassion, you know he is my continuation. I don’t see why we have to say 'I will die,' because I can already see myself in you, in other people, and in future generations."
Sherwood Anderson // "All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is personal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities is carried over the walls."
David Lynch // "The world is, sort of, as it is. The way you go through it changes."
Gaspard Ulliel // "I decided to…try to give the others and myself, one last time, the illusion that I am, until its very end, the master of my life."
(juste la fin du monde)
Duane Michals // "The best part of us is not what we see, it's what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at… People believe their eyeballs and they're totally wrong… That's why I consider most photographs extremely boring…another waterfall, another sunset... But that whole arena of one's experience…grief, loneliness…how do you photograph lust? I mean, how do you deal with these things? This is what you are, not what you see."
Carl Jung // "At present we educate people only up to the point where they can earn a living and marry; then education ceases altogether, as though a complete mental outfit has been acquired. The solution of all the remaining complicated problems of life is left to the discretion, and ignorance, of the individual. Innumerable ill-advised and unhappy marriages, innumerable professional disappointments, are due solely to this lack of adult education. Vast numbers of men and women thus spend their entire lives in complete ignorance of the most important things...The adult is educable, and can respond gratefully to the art of individual education..."
