Leonard Cohen // "If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day."
Simone de Beauvoir // "I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way."
James Baldwin // "You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."
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."
Salvador Dali // "There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."
David Lynch // "I came from painting. And a painter has none of those worries. A painter paints a painting. No one comes in and says, 'You’ve got to change that blue.' It’s a joke to think that a film is going to mean anything if somebody else fiddles with it. If they give you the right to make the film, they owe you the right to make it the way you think it should be... The filmmaker decides on every single element, every single word, every single sound, every single thing going down that highway through time. Otherwise, it won’t hold together. When there’s even a little hint of pressure coming from someplace else…like deadlines or going over budget…this affects the film. You just want support, support, support…in a perfect world…so that you can really get the thing to be correct. Now, this doesn’t happen these days. So…you dive within and experience the self…pure consciousness…it’s the home of all the laws of nature. You get more in tune with those and…nature starts supporting you. So you have that feeling, even if they’re breathing down your neck, and there’s pressure here and pressure there, it doesn’t matter…inside. I say, 'Every day is like a Saturday morning.' You got a great feeling, and it grows and grows and grows. Then it becomes more like a game. Even when they come by…maybe to tell you for the twentieth time that you’ve gone over budget, you welcome them, and you love them, and you have a coffee with them. And they start relaxing. We’re supposed to all get along and we’re supposed to all have so much fun…just happy, our tails just wagging. It’s supposed to be great living, it’s supposed to be fantastic."
Federico Fellini // "I became burdened…with useless baggage that I now want off my back. I want to uneducate myself of…worthless concepts, so that I may return to a virginal personality…to a rebirth of real intent and of real self. Then I won’t be lost in a collective whole that fits nobody because it’s made to fit everybody. Wherever I go, from the corner of my eye, I see…people moving in groups, like schools of fish… This is one of the things I fear more than anything else. I loathe collectivity. Man’s greatness and nobility consists in standing free of the mass. How he extricates himself from it is his own personal problem and private struggle."
Toni Morrison // "For me, success is not a public thing. It's a private thing. It's when you have fewer and fewer regrets."
André Gide // "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
Charles Bukowski // "And remember this: the page you are looking at now, I once typed the words with care with you in mind under a yellow light with the radio on."
Patti Smith // "No one expected me. Everything awaited me."
Carl Jung // "No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you."