Albert Einstein // "Although I am typically a loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated."
Ruth Bernhard // "If you are not willing to see more than what is visible, you won't see anything."
Henry Miller // "Some day I am going to own a few feet of earth somewhere and put a house over it. Just one big room will do, with a stove and a basin of water, a huge desk, a bookcase and an easel. Then life can go rolling by, and what floats in through my door will be sufficient for me."
Hermann Hesse // "My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves."
Saul Steinberg // "I think it is very important for people to run away...from home, from the mainstream, from their family, from the culture, from the society that produced them...because the moment I have to learn something new, like new habits, new languages, I myself have something like a rebirth. I reduce myself to the lowest denominator and this is very healthy for an artist. To start all over again."
Anais Nin // "I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits."
George Harrison // "I fell in love, not with anything or anybody in particular but with everything."
Witold Gombrowicz // "To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence... I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage."
Jack Kerouac // "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
James Baldwin // "I’m aware, you know, that I and the people I love may perish in the morning. I know that. But there’s light on our faces now."
Robert Doisneau // "Some days the mere fact of seeing feels like perfect happiness... The memory of such moments is my most precious possession. Maybe because there've been so few of them. A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there…even if you put them end to end they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds snatched from eternity."
Andrei Tarkovsky // "I am interested above all in the character who is capable of sacrificing himself and his way of life...regardless of whether that sacrifice is made in the name of spiritual values, or for the sake of someone else, or of his own salvation, or of all these things together. Such behaviour precludes, by its very nature, all of those selfish interests that make up a 'normal' rationale for action; it refutes the laws of a materialistic world view. It is often absurd and unpractical. And yet...or indeed for that very reason...the man who acts in that way brings about fundamental changes to people’s lives and to the course of history. The space he lives in becomes a rare, distinctive point of contrast to the empirical concepts of our experience, an area where reality is all the more strongly present."