November 10, 2014
“Writing is being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it, like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm, white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will reform, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.”
Mary Gaitskill, Author
November 10, 2014
“I find it frustrating that if you’re female, whatever your work; people are going to ask how it relates to your female-ness. Every woman artist everywhere is always being talked about in the context of being a woman, whereas male artists are just talked about in the context of their work. That imbalance gets exhausting.
Then again, yeah, I want to make work about being a woman, and I think I’m probably mainly making work that will appeal to girls and women, and their experiences. I don’t mean to deny that being female influences my work. I think there’s a lot of darkness, a lot of struggle, a lot of pressure and weird shit that goes on with being a girl. I don’t ever want to draw blandly happy, sexy women. I want to draw tough women, sad women, violent women, vulnerable women, righteously joyful women. It is what it is.”
Kaye Blegvad, General Maker-of-Things
November 10, 2014
“We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.”
Neil Gaiman, Author
November 9, 2014
“To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don’t think is a good ride.”
Darren Aronofsky, Film Director
November 9, 2014
“In the evolution of knowledge—mistaken and unnecessary beliefs are forced out and supplanted by truer and more necessary knowledge. So too in the evolution of feelings, which takes place by means of art. Lower feelings—less kind and less needed for the good of humanity—are forced out and replaced by kinder feelings which better serve us individually and collectively. This is the purpose of art.”
Leo Tolstoy, Author
November 5, 2014
“Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.”
Jonas Salk, Medical Researcher, Virologist
October 14, 2014
“I don’t care about my personal acting career any more. I’m done with it. After 10 years of making movies and going better than I ever could have imagined, I sort of had to ask myself: What am I supposed to do with all of this success that I have had? Am I just going to keep making movie after movie and be concerned with all of that ‘Are you up, are you down, are you hot, are you not?’, and I don’t really care. What I care about is working with people, what I care about is the remarkable experience of being able to be a part of bringing people together.”
Kevin Spacey, Actor
October 8, 2014
“If you can make the project that you are working on in the theater into something strong and good, where everyone is abe to be his- or herself all the time, freely and honestly, then you live a great life. And that’s the life I’ve had.”
Marian Seldes, Actor
September 30, 2014
“All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It’s like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.”
Truman Capote, Author
September 20, 2014
“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that’s heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.”
George R. R. Martin, Author of “A Song of Ice and Fire,” adapted into TV series “Game of Thrones”
August 3, 2014
“Do something that will last and be beautiful. It doesn’t have to be a bridge or a symphony or book or a business. It could be the look in the eye of a child you raise or a simple garden you tend.”
Ken Burns, Documentary Film Director and Producer
July 23, 2014
“There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art, science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science, art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.”
Raymond Chandler, Author
July 22, 2014
“The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.”
Edward Hopper, Painter
July 18, 2014
“I’m trying to find what makes me tick, and I think I have. It’s not all good news, but I’m very proud of the fact that I’ve made it all work.”
Elaine Stritch, Actor
July 13, 2014
“I don’t want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically…I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency.”
Ingmar Bergman, Filmmaker
June 27, 2014
“The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves, and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.”
Alice McDermott, Author
June 20, 2014
“The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness.”
Josephine Johnson, Author
June 19, 2014
“…be patient. Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing. It is. If you can relax into time, not fight it, not fret at its passing, you will become better. You probably won’t be very good at the beginning, but you will become better, and eventually you may actually become good. But it doesn’t help to be afraid of time, or to measure yourself against prodigies like Conrad or Crane or Rimbaud. There’s always going to be somebody who did it better than you, faster than you, and you don’t want to make comparisons that will discourage you in your work. In fact, most fiction writers tend to graybeard their way into their best work.”
Tobias Wolff, Author
June 18, 2014
“Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual sense of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtle than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.”
Richard Powers, Author
June 16, 2014
“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”
Joyce Carol Oates, Author
June 16, 2014
“The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we’re reading, we’re thinking. It’s a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we’re looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there’s not as much reflective time. And it’s the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.”
Joyce Carol Oates, Author
June 15, 2014
“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
Umberto Eco, Author
June 11, 2014
“Writers, ever since writing, began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word—life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoyevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls ‘the fleas of life’—you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then.”
William Styron, Author
June 6, 2014
“When I was young, I came home one day and I said, ‘Dad, I was told men don’t cry.’ He looked at me and he said, ‘Son, that’s a lie. If you don’t cry, you don’t get rid of that poison that’s in your body, that hurt, that pain. That’s the only way you can truly be strong.”
Thompson Williams, World War II Veteran
June 5, 2014
“I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art.”
Thomas Mann, Author
June 5, 2014
“The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.”
Thomas Mann, Author
May 28, 2014
“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
Rachel Carson, Biologist, Conservationist, Author
May 18, 2014
“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
Nora Ephron, Filmmaker and Author
May 17, 2014
“I have learned that in the open-source world, you are not your code. A critique of your project is not tantamount to a personal attack. An alternative take on the problem your software solves is not hostile or divisive. It is simply the result of a regenerative process, driven by an unending desire to improve the status quo.”
Sam Stephenson, Software Developer
May 16, 2014
“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”
Studs Terkel, Author and Historian
May 16, 2014
“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”
Adrienne Rich, Poet and Educator
May 14, 2014
“I’m not sure what ‘coming out right’ means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort.”
Jasper Johns, Artist
May 14, 2014
“…true on every record we’ve ever made: Our roots are always there, but we’re different people. Every year goes by and we have new experiences, we hear new things, we encounter new things and it influences our music. We’ve never been the kind of band that wanted to make the same record over again.”
Dan Auerbach, Singer and Songwriter of The Black Keys
May 6, 2014
“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.”
Martha Nussbaum, Philosopher, Educator, Author
May 3, 2014
“The effort to understand the Universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”
Steven Weinberg, Physicist
April 30, 2014
“There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.”
Annie Dillard, Author
April 30, 2014
“It’s not black or white; it’s classless, sexless. It doesn’t matter where you fall on any kind of spectrum: emotional truth is emotional truth. And this is the standard I’m trying to reach for. People are different and aesthetics are different—there’s so much variety in literature. But the universal needs the singular, and the singular must contain the universal. If you can put yourself in it, the labels fall away and it becomes art.”
Joe Fassler, Author
April 28, 2014
“My personal definition of science literacy is: How much do you still wonder about the world around you? What is your state of curiosity? When you pass something that you don’t know or understand, do you pause and reflect on what the answer might be? To me, that is the essence of science literacy. All children do this.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist
April 27, 2014
“I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.”
Terry Pratchett, Author
April 25, 2014
“I think the hardest thing to do in the world, show-business-wise, is write comedy. We had a great staff of writers, and if we had a sketch we were rehearsing and it wasn't working, we’d call the writers down and show them what we had come up with. And there were no egos. In 11 years, we never had a writer get angry because we made it a little bit more of our own and maybe a little improved. They would jump in and say, ‘Oh okay, how about this then, while you’re doing that?’ We were all in the sandbox together.”
Carol Burnett, Actress, Comedian, Singer, Writer
April 23, 2014
“The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.”
Willem de Kooning, Artist
April 16, 2014
“Once you catch the idea for an extended narration—drama or novel–and if that idea is firmly within you, then the writing brings you perhaps not so much pleasure as a deep absorption. …You see, my wastepaper basket is filled with works that went a quarter through and which turned out to be among those things that failed to engross the whole of me. And then, for a while, there’s a very agonizing period of time in which I try to explore whether the work I’ve rejected cannot be reoriented in such a way as to absorb me. The decision to abandon it is hard.”
Thornton Wilder, Playwright
April 11, 2014
“My main work is to grow and expand, and to investigate what else I’m made of besides being a musician. We all manifest ourselves in a lot of different ways. But most of us define ourselves by that one single thing that we’re probably best known for. And my belief is that we shortchange ourselves in that way, whereas if we define ourselves as a human being first, it includes that and every other aspect of what we are. So when you talk about ‘doing the work’, that’s the work I’m interested in. What can I contribute as a human being?”
Herbie Hancock, Pianist and Composer
April 7, 2014
“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
Barbara Kingsolver, Author
March 30, 2014
“I’ve always believed a book functions best when it leaves a person more capable of living in the world. As readers, we experience a palpable, realistic verisimilitude. In the act of identifying with characters, we suspend belief in the material world and adopt the world of the narration. By calling attention to that artifice, and allowing the reader simultaneously to feel that world as a believable, palpable world, and also as a made thing, the book becomes more powerful.”
Richard Powers, Author
March 27, 2014
“[Being labeled eccentric] can be said in a way that kind of marginalizes creativity or art. I’ve always felt, when it’s too easy, that I want to pull it apart and ask, ‘What’s underneath this layer?’ I think we should celebrate those things.”
Beck, Singer-Songwriter
March 25, 2014
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”
Gloria Steinem, Feminist and Author
March 17, 2014
“Living in that childish wonder is a most beautiful feeling—I can so well remember it. There was always something more—behind and beyond everything—to me, the golden spectacles were very, very big.”
Kate Greenaway, Children’s Book Illustrator and Author
February 20, 2014
“Creative people thrive on serendipity, spontaneous interactions, moments of ribald humor, intense debate or just simple eye contact, and I felt as if I was losing myself. I decided that it was time to act. So I tried an experiment. I just stopped saying yes and started saying no to things.
Actually, there was a bit more method to my madness. I started a ritual that I still use today: I sit down and look at my calendar every Sunday night, pore through my coming week’s meetings and cancel a bunch of them—redundant ones where I don’t need to be ‘in the loop,’ ones where there is an opportunity for someone else to make a decision, ones that don’t particularly inspire me, or ones where I can’t really add value. My overarching goal right now, wherever possible, is to give myself more time to simply be.”
Paul Bennett, Chief Creative Officer at IDEO
February 18, 2014
“Word-work is sublime…because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Toni Morrison, Novelist
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