John Steinbeck // "It is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus...a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time."
Jeff Buckley // "I need space, stillness...and no telephones. If I write it takes a long time for a certain language to emerge. Because it’s sort of like quitting smoking when you first start writing...it takes a while for the nicotine to leave your system, until you’re totally pure. Then you start."
Claude Monet // "What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence."
Bob Dylan // "And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns...that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale...that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself."
Joan Didion // "I’m very attached to certain forms, little compulsive rituals. I like to cook; I like to sew. They’re peaceful things, and they’re an expression of caring."
Jack Kerouac // "Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot."
Tennessee Williams // "I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now."
David Lynch // "I am searching for a good pair of pants. I never found a pair of pants that I just love. I like comfortable pants and clothes I can work in, that I feel comfortable in. I don't really like to get dressed up. I like to wear the same thing every day and feel comfortable. It's a fit, it's a certain kind of feeling, and if they're not right, which they never are, it's a sadness. You know, it interrupts the flow of happiness. I'm working on it, believe me."
Miles Davis // "When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that makes it good or bad."
Pier Paolo Pasolini // "You are like a precious stone which is violently shattered into a thousand splinters in order to be rebuilt of a material more lasting than that of life, the material of poetry."
Björk // "I think creativity always lives somewhere in everyone but its nature is quite pranksterish and slippery and every time you grab its tail it’s found a new corner to thrive in. Perhaps the trick is not to force it and put it up against a wall and want it to be in a particular area. But rather, with a lot of kindness, sniff it out and wonder where it has gone to this time around... I definitely don’t succeed in this all the time, but feel overall things have been more fertile when I trust this creature’s instincts and follow it rather than me willfully reforming it into a circus animal... Anyways: as much as you’d like to ignore this animal you have to attend it. Because if you don’t, them dark times turn up…"
Virginia Woolf // "Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent."
