NITCH

Photo of Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre // "We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine."

Photo of Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami // "Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard."

Photo of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan // "I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down... I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I'd been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture. I was changing in other ways, too. Things that used to affect me, didn't affect me anymore. I wasn’t too concerned about people, their motives. I didn’t feel the need to examine every stranger that approached."

Photo of Nina Simone

Nina Simone // "I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear."

Photo of Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg // "To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard."

Photo of Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke // "Well…most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. Right? They have a life to live, and they're not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg's poems or anybody's poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don't love you anymore, and all of a sudden, you're desperate for making sense out of this life… 'Has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?' Or the inverse…something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes. You love them so much, you can't even see straight. You know, you're dizzy. 'Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?' And that's when art's not a luxury, it's actually sustenance. We need it."

Photo of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez // "I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature."

Photo of Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy // "Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave."

Photo of Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse // "This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today...You must play your part and sing a song, one of your best."

Photo of Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein // "A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'... He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature... Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."

Photo of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde // "The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist."

Photo of Anais Nin

Anais Nin // "I have a kind of courage you do not understand. I am far from blind, far from indifferent, but I will not indulge in impotent, passive despair. I will not add to the despair of the world. I am working on counterpoisins… I create a space in which people can breathe, restore their faith and strength to live."

Photo of Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz // "Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease."

Photo of Albertine Sarrazin

Albertine Sarrazin // "I would like to stay like this, lazy, warm, in the silence where only our regular breathing can be heard, without ever having to make gestures, speak words which sell us out and betray us; this moment is real and alive, I stretch it into eternity."

Photo of Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski // "I too have been misled by the Romantic concept of writing. As a youth I saw too many movies of the great Artist, and the writer was always some tragic and very interesting chap with a fine goatee, blazing eyes, and inner truths springing to his tongue continually. What a way to be, I thought, ah. But it isn’t so. The best writers that I know talk very little, I mean those who are doing the good writing. In fact, there is nothing duller than a good writer. In a crowd or even with one other person, he is always busy…subconsciously…recording every goddamned thing. He is not interested in speechmaking or being the Life of the Party. He is greedy; he saves his juices for the typewriter. You can talk away inspiration, you can destroy god-given genius with your mouth. Energy will only spread so far. I too am greedy. One must be. The only juices that can be given up, the only time that can simply be given away is the time for Love. Love gives strength; it breaks down inbred hatreds and prejudices. It makes the writing more full. But all other things must be saved for the work… I’d never advise anybody to become a writer, only if writing is the only thing which keeps you from going insane. Then, perhaps, it’s worth it."

Photo of Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud // "I have never been able to talk as I think, to anyone. With most people you can only talk about ideas, not the channel through which these ideas pass, the atmosphere in which they bathe, the subtle essence which escapes as one clothes them. Most of the time, I don’t feel like talking about ideas anyway. I am more interested in sensations."

Photo of J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger // "I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice."

Photo of Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould // "The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline…but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."

Photo of Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges // "I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited."

Photo of Tina Turner

Tina Turner // "Sometimes you have to let everything go...purge yourself. If you are unhappy with anything, whatever is bringing you down, get rid of it. Because you will find that when you are free...your true self comes out."

Photo of Albert Camus

Albert Camus // "Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park... It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself... That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be."

Photo of bell hooks

bell hooks // "Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as means of escape."

Photo of Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick // "If you really want to communicate something, even if it’s just an emotion or an attitude, let alone an idea, the least effective and least enjoyable way is directly. It only goes in about an inch. But if you can get people to the point where they have to think a moment what it is you’re getting at, and then discover it, the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart."

Photo of Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins // "It doesn't matter how sensitive you are or how damn smart and educated you are, if you're not both at the same time, if your heart and your brain aren't connected, aren't working together harmoniously, well, you're just hopping through life on one leg. You may think you're walking, you may think you're running a damn marathon, but you're only on a hop trip. The connections gotta be maintained."