Jorge Luis Borges // "For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't."
Charles Bukowski // "I get many phonecalls now. They are all alike. 'Are you Charles Bukowski, the writer?' 'Yes,' I tell them. And they tell me that they understand my writing, and some of them are writers or want to be writers and they have dull and horrible jobs and they can't face the room, the apartment, the walls that night...they want somebody to talk to, and they can't believe that I can't help them, that I don't know the words. They can't believe that often now I double up in my room, grab my gut and say 'Jesus Jesus Jesus, not again!' They can't believe that the loveless people, the streets, the loneliness, the walls are mine too. And when I hang up the phone they think I have held back my secret. I don't write out of knowledge. When the phone rings, I too would like to hear words that might ease some of this. That's why my number's listed."
Thelonious Monk // "The loudest noise in the world is silence."
René Daumal // "You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know."
Henry Miller // "The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware…joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem."
Leo Tolstoy // "Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it's only here that the new and the good begins."
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."
Tennessee Williams // "Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?"
Ingmar Bergman // "I don't want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically... I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency."
Janis Joplin // "To be true to myself, to be the person that was on the inside of me, and not play games. That’s what I’m trying to do mostly in the whole world, is to not bullshit myself and not bullshit anybody else."
Paul Cezanne // "Nature isn’t at the surface; it’s in the depth."
Anais Nin // "As I passed I saw a cafe, a cafe on the street, with an open door, and one small round table outside, just big enough for two persons, two glasses of wine, two small iron chairs, a diminutive cafe…shabby, with a faded sign, a dull window, lopsided walls, uneven roof. The smallness of it, the intimacy of it, the humanity of its proportion… A human being feels one can sit in such a cafe even if one’s hair is not perfectly in place and one’s shoes are not shined... One could sit there and feel unique, feel in tune with the world, or out of tune, feel human and open to human emotion... One could sit there if one felt the world too big and too barbaric, and feel once more in a human setting, a proper setting for a human being… Why did I feel warmed by imperfections, discomfort, and patina? Because intense living leaves scars…inner scars, softened, human wear and tear."