Robert DeNiro // "There's no right or wrong. There's only good and bad. And 'bad' usually happens when you're trying too hard to do it right. There's a very broad spectrum of things that can inhibit you. The most important thing...is to feel loose enough to create what you want to create, and be free to try anything. To have choices."
Jack Kerouac // "Everything is ecstasy, inside... Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-endings drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside...and you will remember."
George Harrison // "I just have a belief that this is only one little bit...the physical world is one little bit of the universe."
Maurice Sendak // "Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters...I sent him a card and I drew a picture...I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.' Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."
Jean Cocteau // "If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed."
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."
Viggo Mortensen // "To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life."
Werner Herzog // "I'm trying to find these rare moments where you feel completely illuminated. Facts never illuminate you. The phone directory of Manhattan doesn't illuminate you, although it has factually correct entries, millions of them. But these rare moments of illumination that you find when you read a great poem, you instantly know. You instantly feel this spark of illumination. You are almost stepping outside of yourself and you see something sublime."
Charles Bukowski // "Understand me...I do not have time for things that have no soul."
Toni Morrison // "It’s not possible to constantly hone in on the crisis. You have to have the love and you have to have the magic, that’s also life."
Elliott Erwitt // "The work I care about is terribly simple."
John Coltrane // "I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing...the emotional reaction is all that matters, as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood."