"Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway."
— Theodor Adorno
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I think if your work comes from inside your own head a lot…I’m thinking of Fellini, whose images on the screen and whose projects are enormously personal, that you don’t have to see anybody else or do anything else. You could just sit in your room and make those same pictures... I could sit in my room and never go out and probably make a "Take the Money and Run" or "Bananas," because the humor is not rooted…it’s surrealistic."
— Woody Allen, interview with Dick Cavett, date unknown.
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"I will not Reason & Compare: My business is to Create."
— William Blake, "Jerusalem - The Emanation of the Giant Albion." ________________________________________________________________________
“But it is very difficult to be a woman and to be likeable...This desire to be likeable, it is really a pain in the neck. How are you going to be likeable and be yourself?”
— Louise Bourgeois, "The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine"
Source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl//6248988.html
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“Little by little the desire came to me to invent my own myths, adopting the point of view of the primitive mind. The only way I could devise for simulating that state was the old Surrealist method of abandoning conscious control and writing whatever words came from the pen."
— Paul Bowles, Without Stopping: An Autobiography, 261-262.
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"The uptown slums are being demolished. But the rectangular tenements that replace them have not a trace of invention. Their bleakness is absolute. No man has ever dreamed of a city of such monotonous severity. And there must be some bond between our houses and our dreams."
— John Cheever, as quoted in Rick Burns' documentary New York, writing about federal building projects that replaced demolished New York neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s.
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"'It's like we've been flung back in time,' Heinrich says of the barracks. 'Name one thing you could make. . . . We think we're so great and modern. . . . Could you rub flints together? Would you know a flint if you saw one? . . . What is a nucleotide? You don't know, do you? . . . What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. . . . But nobody acutally knows anything.'''
— Don DeLillo, White Noise, Penguin Edition (Great Books of the 20th Century), p. 142.
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"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber or every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it—there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
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"Instead of shooting arrows at someone else's target, which I've never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre."
— Brian Eno
Source: www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jan/17/brian-eno-interview-paul-morley
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"It's not what you do, and not how you do it, or how much. It's what you make out of what you do."
"Bob used to say he only had six steps; but what six steps!"
— Bob Fosse, as quoted by Gene Foote, in
Sing Out Louise! 150 Broadway Musical Stars Remember 50 Years, pps. 136 and 138.
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"She's not an American and that's part of being a New Yorker."
— Fran Lebowitz, "Day Before Diane von Furstenburg."
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"She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours."
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin, Book 4, p, 332
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"A friend of mine recently did the Oprah show about transgendered youth. It was obvious that we, as a culture, have a hard time trying to understand the difference between a drag queen, transsexual, and a transgender, yet we find it very easy to know the difference between the American baseball league and the National baseball league, when they are both so similar. We’ll learn the difference to that. One of my hobbies is to research and go underneath ideas to discover why certain ones stay in place while others do not. Like Adam and Eve, which is a flimsy fairytale story, yet it is something that people believe; what, exactly, keeps it in place?"
— RuPaul, in "RuPaul Speaks about Society and the State of Drag as
Performance Art." Interivew with David Shankbone, Wikinews, October 16, 2007
Source: RuPaul_speaks_about_society_and_the_state_of_drag_as_performance_art
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"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owesto one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us...I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself."
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 2
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"Sometimes you say to yourself, 'what should I do next?'….you're trying to think of the right thing to do, but quite often you should think 'what's the wrong thing to do, what should I not do?'...and then do that."
— Robert Wilson, "Absolute Wilson."
