Björk // "I find workaholism really anti-fertile. For example, in my work with Scandinavian schools with biophilia, it is very apparent that short schooldays and a lot of free time inspires the imagination most and not only makes the kids happier but also they make more original things in the end. I’ve seen how the working until midnight in the biggest cities is really destructive...and you aren’t coming up with any new ideas but just repeating old stuff on a loop."
Lina Kostenko // "The main thing is to look into the eyes of the beast and simply to remain human."
Tracey Emin // "I gave up painting, I gave up art, I gave up believing, I gave up faith. I had what I called my emotional suicide, I gave up a lot of friendships with people, I just gave up believing in life really and it’s taken me years to actually start loving and believing again. I realized that there was a greater idea of creativity. Greater than anything I could make just with my mind or with my hands, I realized there was something…the essence of creativity, that moment of conception, the whole importance, the whole being of everything and I realized that if I was going to make art it couldn’t be about…it couldn’t be about a fucking picture. It couldn’t be about something visual. It had to be about where it was really coming from."
Tennessee Williams // "The fact that we continue to fall in love with people and ideas and places is not evidence of our cupidity or our dumbness, but our strength. When we love…really love…in any way, we are announcing to the world that we intend to survive."
David Lynch // "Ideas are the number one best thing going… Ideas come to us, we don’t really create an idea, we just catch them, like fish. No chef ever takes credit for making the fish, it’s just preparing the fish. So you get an idea and it is like a seed…and in your mind the idea is seen and felt and it explodes, like it’s got electricity and light connected to it, and it has all the images and the feeling. And it’s like in an instant you know the idea… Then the thing is translating that to some medium. It could be a film idea, or a painting idea, or a furniture idea. It doesn’t matter. It wants to be something. It’s a seed for something. So the whole thing is translating that idea to a medium... And in the case of film…it takes a long time, and you always need to go back and stay true to that idea. Keep checking that idea. And what you realize is the idea is more than you realize. And if you’re true to it, when the work is finished and some years go by, you can get even more out of it if you’ve been true to the idea in the first place."
James Baldwin // "Most people live in almost total darkness…people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which...if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define...you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn’t ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don’t cheat, if you don’t lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope... Because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad... The trouble is that although the artist can do it, the price that he has to pay himself and that you, the audience, must also pay, is a willingness to give up everything, to realize that although you spent twenty-seven years acquiring this house, this furniture, this position, although you spent forty years raising this child, these children, nothing, none of it belongs to you. You can only have it by letting it go. You can only take if you are prepared to give... It is a total risk of everything, of you and who you think you are, who you think you’d like to be, where you think you’d like to go...everything, and this forever, forever."
Albert Camus // "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
Alexei Navalny // "Everything will be all right. And, even if it won’t be, we’ll have the consolation of having lived honest lives."
Ernest Hemingway // "Don’t ever kid yourself about loving someone. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. What you have...whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow."
Walt Whitman // "The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment...to put things down without deliberation...without worrying about their style...without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote, wrote, wrote… By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught."
Frida Kahlo // "I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of 'madness.' Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love, and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like…they would all say: 'Poor thing, she’s crazy!' …I would build my own world, which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds… My madness would not be an escape from 'reality.'"
David Lynch // "We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination."
Timothy Leary // "The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance."
Jane Birkin // "Even when you show everything, you reveal very little."
Mahmoud Darwish // "Drink your coffee, embrace the silence, do not take people seriously, do not take life upon yourself, do not exaggerate your emotions, and do not please anyone against your will."
Salvador Dali // "Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali."
Yohji Yamamoto // "Creation is lifework, creation is how...you spend your life, you cannot divide life and the creation, it’s impossible. Shut your eyes, close your ears, don’t use your brain, use your heart, your soul."
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."
Jack Kerouac // "The world you see is just a movie in your mind. Rocks dont see it. Bless and sit down. Forgive and forget. Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now. That’s the story. That’s the message. Nobody understands it, nobody listens, they’re all running around like chickens with heads cut off. I will try to teach it but it will be in vain, s’why I’ll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes."
Andy Warhol // "I can never get over when you’re on the beach how beautiful the sand looks and the water washes it away and straightens it up and the trees and the grass all look great. I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own."
James Baldwin // "Has everyone been in love? Not on the basis of the evidence. If they have, they’ve forgotten it. If everyone had been in love they’d treat their children differently. They’d treat each other differently."
Simone de Beauvoir // "I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way."
Francis Ford Coppola // "You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you’ll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost."
Charles Bukowski // "I spent weeks, months, years mulling about, passing my life away in tiny rooms and I was content with that... What a delicious thing it was to stretch out on a lumpy mattress in the dark on some second floor over an avenue, watching the headlights of cars work patterns across the ceiling... Rolling cigarettes in the dark, watching the red ash glow so red, it was magic even when a bit of ash would fall on your chest and burn you...shit!...you’d leap up laughing, then settle back down, wanting nothing, having nothing... I think I fattened my god damned soul in these rooms. All those hours of years...I suppose I was hiding, not wanting to be them, not wanting to be what my father had become...It looked like shit, it looked like waste... I hid, I hid, I hid, like a gopher, a mole, all I had was myself to feed upon and it filled me. I only became emptied when at times I had to enter the marketplace to sustain myself and I couldn’t believe those lives: men as slaves, doing monotonous and repetitive work they would never escape except by being discharged or dying but they accepted the horrible hours in order to make payment upon major necessities and minor luxuries. I preferred suicide, attempted several, failed, went back to the small rooms. And in those rooms, I blossomed again, like a flower, more like a flower on a cactus, but Christ it was marvelous, an out, a waiting, a calm place...I understood men who sat on mountain tops, who lived in caves. I understood that to have nothing was to have everything. The most valuable thing on earth was to have each hour as your own, that was all there was... To go up, fumble for your key, find it, fit it to the door, and the door opens and there is the dresser and there is the bed and there is the chair and there is the window and the dripping sink and there is the mouse sitting on the dresser, he has gotten bold, your eyes meet and his are much more beautiful than yours, and then with a lightning dart, he is gone and you are a young man in a very old world and you know it and it is absolutely strange and you sit down on the bed and take off your shoes and everything everywhere is quiet, final and perfect."