we're saved not by god, but by love. that's the most we can hope for. 
- ingmar bergman

If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.
Emile Zola

learn from the past, think of the present, dream of the future - massimo vignelli

any advice for the young ?
it's a tough business,
you have to be amazingly consistent and persistent.
you have to work like hell.
you cannot become an excellent practioneer without constantly
working hard all your life. it is not an easy way to earn your money.
and... you have to be well trained and you have not to be narrow to 
references, because everybody else is doing that at the same time.
the richness of understanding comes from the deep historical,
philosophical idea. - milton glaser

describe your style, like a good friend of yours would describe it.
its most striking character is its randomness, its range,
very often you could not say that the job was done by me,
because there are jobs that require the absence of style,
as well as those that require the presence of style.
as a graphic designer my work is characterized more by drawings.
more than many of my contemporaries I love to draw, love to 
illustrate, make pictures. for us who came out of the history of 
modernism, it might not be the appropriate way to work. 
perhaps it is just not a comfortable way to work. 
what I want to say is that it would be hard for somebody 
looking at the range of things that I do to see a persistent pattern 
in them, except in the realm of drawing and illustration... 
where the choice of colors and forms are more obviously personal.
I have the idea that there isn't any truth in style.
it's very temporal, bound to the moment that we live in and the 
way we see things. if it's useful to you, fine, if not you move on to 
something else. - milton glaser

from Phillipe Stark...

question: you once said that it is your dream to make the world 
a better place... is it beauty you are looking for?
Stark: no, not for beauty. we have to replace beauty, which is a cultural concept, 
with goodness, which is a humanist concept.
question: the beauty of intelligence?
Stark: yes. of intelligence. the elegance of intelligence and the beauty of happiness.

Ross Lovegrove

can you describe an evolution in your work?
one grows up, one has a series of influences and 
those influences bear down on how you design objects. 
some of my early work was experimental. I was exploring 
and trying to see where I would fit in. a defining moment was a 
camera that I did at the royal college of art. at the time memphis 
was all the rage, I doubted that whole scene, all the colour and form 
didn't feel very natural to me. I designed this camera, that to 
me defined restraint, which I still have in me. something like the 
staircase in my studio, a self made object, which has everything 
that I'm looking for - in terms of calming it down, elegance of form, 
minimum material, appropriate technology and succinct function -. 
if I were to do a camera now though. 
I have this feeling that I should do it in a weird sort-of cartolage 
material, somewhere between nylon and silicon. 
I'm currently looking at systems called netification, 
coralization and reduction of mass through perforation and 
so on, not necessarily in terms of products but cars and 
architectural projects, that I am working on.

From Broadcast:

I repeat myself. I believe that through this unconscious repitition, I have been leaking messages to myself for years. Two words have come up again and again

for me. These two words feature in a number of my songs and I have not realized it until now. The words are 'let go.' I have been telling myself to let go for years. So much so I am claiming ownership of them. They are my words. I refuse to let go of them. They are going to be my reminders to let go. Perhaps my epitaph.

The lyrics of 'Tender Buttons' were generated through automatic writing. They are my free falling thoughts. I believe that words have their own life. That if you throw words together randomly, they naturally make sense. Language just wants to be understood.

"what we have as a constant thread in our work is trying to boil 
things down to being strong and very simple and looking as 
though they happened very fast - which they may not have." - Ivan Chermayeff

"IT'S CRUCIAL TO HAVE AN ACTIVE FANTASY LIFE"
-Jenny Holzer

describe your style, like a good friend of yours would describe it.
my job isn't about shape.
I am most interested in working on the typology of things, 
on the relationship between the various components of an object 
while paying attention to the whole, afterwards the form comes, 
following the tension which I put into all of my designs. - Matali Crasset

» EXPRESS: So the design language is your own. 
» PRINCE-RAMUS: I'll take issue with the way you said that. We believe in a truly communal, shared authorship. In fact, a step beyond that - not being so focused on authorship. We were always much more concerned with critique than with who's generating an idea.

» EXPRESS: You've described your approach to architecture as "hyperrational" and "almost dumb." 
» PRINCE-RAMUS: If you focus on a project's problems, constraints and the desires of the client and try for really tailored one-off solutions, you'll get something much more interesting than if you set out to do a certain thing. That's not in competition with being formal. Form functions, so as you're trying to 

maximize the performance, sometimes the form is the most important thing to achieve that. Historically, there has been form versus function. Either form follows function or it's function be damned. We think it's kind of bunk, a false dialectic. There are moments when a project's single most important functional issue is its form.

» EXPRESS: What is the role of emotion?
» PRINCE-RAMUS: It's huge, but it's also the part that we don't talk about. If you don't talk about the emotional side of it but say, "We need to do this for a programmatic or political reason," you build up the argument and generate something unusual and new, and the client will embrace it.

BRUCE: Well, now you seem to be in a great relationship.
ASIA: Yes, the only person I want to spend time with is my boyfriend, Marco. He's very peaceful and calm. He plays the piano, and I read, and he's never intrusive. He's a great person. It's a miracle to me, because I've never even had friends that I would want to hang around with for longer than twenty-four hours.

Edwards and Kornfeld try to unlock that puzzle, invoking along the way - among others - Marcel Proust, Immanuel Kant, Blaise Pascal, and John Ruskin (quoted on "the mysterious sense of accountable life in things themselves"). They take pains to point out that they're not interested in identifying the best: "'Best' is a judgment based on statistics, not taste or instinct; and in a world of constant technological innovation and furious competition, being the best of anything is usually a short term occupation."

"Children are the ideal public: they know what they want, they have no prejudices, and if they don't like something they say so straightaway. If other people were like that, many relationships would be much simpler." - Bruno Munari

Ginsberg claimed throughout his life that his biggest inspiration was Kerouac's concept of Spontaneous Prose. He believed literature should come from the soul without conscious restrictions. However, Ginsberg was much more prone to revise than Kerouac. For example, when Kerouac saw the first draft of "Howl" he disliked the fact that Ginsberg had made editorial changes in pencil (transposing "negro" and "angry" in the first line, for example). Kerouac only wrote out his 

concepts of Spontaneous Prose at Ginsberg's insistence because Ginsberg wanted to learn how to apply the technique to his poetry.

"The trouble with people is not that they dont know, but that they know so much that aint so." - Henry Wheeler Shaw

"The only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in a historical perspective, but for us, right now. This project implies the withering away of all the alienated forms of communication." - Guy Debord

"PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE IS ESCAPISM"
-Jenny Holzer

"LOVE is the extremely difficult realization that something other than one self is real." - Iris Murdoch

What were the most influential pieces of instruction and advice given by your faculty?

Both came from Mr. Keedy. First, he taught us the methodology to use concepts as devices, not as end goals. If a concept drives the form-making, it should lead not to an avoidance of form as in so much "generic" design, but to innovative form. It's also not worth a lot if the concept is visible - all it does is make its designer look smart. What's cooler is if new form seems to come out of nowhere, and one way of achieving this is to use an invisible concept. I got this insight from Mr. Keedy, but also from Brian Eno's scenarios for the making of Bowie's "Outside".

Another quote by Mr. Keedy has become my mantra, especially when fighting the revivalist tendencies of the last ten years. He said something like "Don't imitate the present. Invent the future." It is as important for students - who at first only try to make work as good as the stuff out there on the streets - as it is for mature designers, who might have given up searching for new visual languages and essentially reiterate what they've done before. Of course, conveniently, the idea of newness also happens to be the driving economic force behind capitalism. - Jens Gehlhaar (Brand New School)

"For years, they were telling me to play commercial, be commercial. I'm not commercial. I say, play your own way. You play what you want, and let the public pick up on what you were doing, even if it takes 15, 20 years."
Thelonious Monk

"Sometimes making nothing leads to something." - Francis Aly

Do you think there's a God?

(Long pause...almost a minute)

How long are you prepared to wait for the answer to these questions? These are complicated questions. I don't hesitate because I haven't got ideas about them, I hesitate because I have a responsibility to you to answer them carefully. In a funny way I do believe in fate. There's a North African word--it it Moroccan? Yes it is--which is baraka. Baraka means something between karma and fate. Certain people accrue baraka. They accrue the ability to attract interesting things to themselves, interesting and pleasant things. Now this seems to be manifestly true. That definitely happens, you know. You see people, you meet people to whom interesting things continuously happen. Why does this happen to them and not to others? Why is it happening to me? I think that some people are very good at being opportunistic in a good way, and in a large scale way. - Brian Eno

Cage: People ask what the avant-garde is and whether it's finished. It isn't. There will always be one. The avantgarde is flexibility of mind. And it follows like day, the night from not falling prey to government and education. Without the avant-garde nothing would get invented. If your head is in the clouds, keep your feet on the ground. If your feet are on the ground, keep your head in the clouds.

Cage: Well the most important piece is my silent piece, 4'33".

Montague: That's very interesting. Why?

Cage: Because you don't need it in order to hear it.

Montague: Just a minute, let me think about that a moment.

Cage: You have it all the time. And it can change your mind, making it open to things outside it. It is continually changing. It's never the same twice. In fact, and Thoreau knew this, and it's been known traditionally in India, it is the statement that music is continuous. In India they say: "Music is continuous, it is we who turn away." So whenever you feel in need of a little music, all you have to do is to pay close attention to the sounds around you. I always think of my silent piece before I write the next piece.

...'Cause people often talk about being scared of change
But for me I'm more afraid of things staying the same
'Cause the game is never won
By standing in any one place
For too long...
-Nick Cave "Jesus is the Moon"

"THE FUTURE IS STUPID"
-Jenny Holzer

The process - an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things - was always what mattered most to him. "Screwing things up is a virtue," he said when he was 74. "Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea."

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, "to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art."

"I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop," he said in an interview there. "At the time that I am bored or understand - I use those words interchangeably - another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I'm not one. I'd rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can't ignore."

He added: "Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's aesthetics. I 

think you're born an artist or not. I couldn't have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations."
-ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

Losers are winners with a new attitude...Ray Mathew Spencer III

He finally surrendered to the police. In the film he remembers that the only moment he actually feared for his safety was when he was being hustled down the WTC stairs. Back on earth, he was mobbed by reporters, all with the same question: why?

"There is no why, " he said. "When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk." - Philippe Petit from the film "Man on Wire"

As I watched (or rather, witnessed) this documentary, I felt the sense of absolute purity in the idea alone. The idea becomes an unexplainable experience. Ultimately, powerful ideas are sentient and self-sufficient.

There's a mountain. Let's climb it! - Design Observer Comment to Petit

"It was all so senselessly brave and beautiful."
The thought of something being senselessly brave. Senslessly beautiful. -Design Observer Comment to Petit

"As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency." --John Cage

"The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation."
John Cage

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." John Cage

"PUSH YOURSELF TO THE LIMIT AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE"
-Jenny Holzer

"Painting is a physical thinking process to continue an interior dialogue," Amy Sillman states, "a way to engage in a kind of internal discourse, or sublanguage-mumbling..." Sillman's canvases offer glimpses into a subliminal world. Strangely intimate, her abstractions capture the free-flow of half-formulated ideas, resounding with a distant familiarity. In Cliff 1, Sillman creates an effervescent landscape, her paint techniques mirror the convergence of unconscious thought: rock rendered with the chalky texture of rubbings, sunset as violent deep orange slashes, birds and flowers with cartoon folly. Sillman paints with an almost child-like sense of innocence, unmitigated and unembarrassed. Embracing a modernist reverence of inspired imagination, Sillman defines honesty as the most enduring quality of painting. - About Amy Sillman

Terry Riley / A Rainbow In Curved Air
"And then all wars ended / Arms of every kind were outlawed and the masses gladly contributed them to giant foundries in which they were melted down and the metal poured back into the earth / The Pentagon was turned on its side and painted purple, yellow & green / All boundaries were dissolved / The slaughter of animals was forbidden / The whole of lower Manhattan became a meadow in which unfortunates from the Bowery were allowed to live out their fantasies in the sunshine and were cured / People swam in the sparkling rivers under blue skies streaked only with incense pouring from the new factories / The energy from dismantled nuclear weapons provided free heat and light / World health was restored / An abundance of organic vegetables, fruits and grains was growing wild along the discarded highways / National flags were sewn together into brightly colored circus tents under which politicians were allowed to perform harmless theatrical games / The concept of work was forgotten"

We build worlds to make ourselves more comfortable. This is about being uncomfortable.
-JULIA BURLINGHAM

"IT CAN BE HELPFUL TO KEEP GOING NO MATTER WHAT"
-Jenny Holzer

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
-Winston Churchill

"Risk and survive. Stall and die. Jump and rise. Fail and learn. Defeat your insecurities. The unknown is not comfortable. Nothing is missing. Creativity is the sheer and pure manifestation of intelligence mixed with a high dose of imagination.

"Be inventive when facing delicate requests, unmanageable deadlines and unreasonable expectations. Learn to do with what you don't have and pretend you can."
-Carole Guevin

"Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches." - Andy Warhol

"Especially today, I think it's amazing to hang out on stoops here, where we live and see there's another way. There's always another way. Magazines took such a step backwards over the last twenty years trying to close the door to the other way. And I'm always interested in the other way, and I attach myself to that, whether it's with the clothes, the music, the cooking or just the idea of bringing people together. There's so much joy to be had with the small little events that happen to you daily. The last couple of days have been magical. I walk out of this place, vibrating at a pace that's just phenomenal. There could be two or three people walking down the street, could be a kid and its mother and they sit down on the floor and... that's very precious. That lasts forever."
-Mark Borthwick

"THE FUTURE IS STUPID"
-Jenny Holzer

Appreciation is a wonderful thing, it makes what is great in others belong to us as well. -Voltaire

"Don Shirley's music is hard to categorize. It is possible to say that as an arranger-composer he treats each piece of music as a new composition, not just an arrangement. Don plays Standards in a non-standard way. He is a virtuoso, playing everything from show tunes, to ballads, to his personal arrangements of Negro spirituals, to jazz, and always with the overtone of a classically-trained musician who has utmost respect for the music he is playing."
-Bio about Don Shirley via Wikipedia

"Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art." - Andy Warhol

"There are a lot of motherfuckers in this world who have the party and put out the press release and the fucking logo and the advertising, but they never get to actually doing the work. And now they're selling their aeron chairs on eBay. You know what I'm talking about:the dot com boom. It's like, how about you go home at night and rest and enjoy life, whatever your shit is: kids, surfing, skateboarding, running. Then come back here and work hard again the next day." - Jeff Castelaz (Dangerbird Records)

"The pages of Hustler were pretty tame-and circulation pretty flat-until I stopped listening to the people who were saying, 'Larry, you can't do that,'" Flynt wrote in the pages of his magazine. "Once I began following my own instincts, sales took off and I became a millionaire. And that, I think, is a key secret to every person's success, be they male or female, banker or pornographer: Trust in your gut." - Larry Flynt

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide whether it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they're deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol

"In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And

they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what's so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can't, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say 'Did you understand that?' but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that's magical and that's the power that film has." 
- David Lynch

"Before you're famous. That's the interesting part. That's what I'm going to remember."
-Richard Prince

"all my life i wanted to be somebody, but then i realized i should have just been myself. "
-Unknown

"It is only by realizing what I am that I have found comfort of any kind." 
-Oscar Wilde

"Focused. I'm a hustler. And my hustle is trying to figure out the best ways to do what I like without having to do much else." 
- Mos Def

"Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit."
- e. e. cummings

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
- e. e. cummings

"The world of achievement has always belonged to the optimist."
- J Harold Wilkins

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind." 
- William James

"Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them."
-Brian Eno

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler."
-Henry David Thoreau

"Experience is what creates our knowledge; people's experiences are limited hence all people's knowledge is limited. The past and our experience makes us who we are through what we observe. If this is the case, we are everything that we observe in this moment as long as we don't use the past for our own bias and security. Essentially the division between the observer and the observed is an illusion. We are everything."
-Chris Gorgione

"The same basic principle, you got to be who you are, no matter how dangerous it is."
-Laurence Weiner

"If you really want to do it, you do it. There are no excuses."
-Unknown

Born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America's contemporary artists. Nauman finds inspiration in the activities, speech, and materials of everyday life. Confronted with "What to do?" in his studio soon after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1964 with a BFA, and then the University of California, Davis in 1966 with an MFA, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that "If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product." Working in the diverse mediums of sculpture, video, film, printmaking, performance, and installation, Nauman concentrates less on the development of a characteristic style and more on the way in which a process or activity can transform or become a work of art. A survey of his diverse output demonstrates the alternately political, prosaic, spiritual, and crass methods by which Nauman examines life in all its gory details, mapping the human arc between life and death. The text from an early neon work proclaims: "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." Whether or not we-or even Nauman-agree with this statement, the underlying subtext of the piece emphasizes the way in which the audience, artist, and culture at large are involved in the resonance a work of art will ultimately have.
-Bruce Nauman Biography

The Art of Transformation

I am in a process of transformation, despite myself. Even with a clear understanding of God as Change, I sometimes fight and resist the changes that are essential to my being and growth. I fixate upon the challenges of accepting greater and greater responsibilities. I begin to desire results without maintaining the discipline that is required to manifest the necessary changes of heart and of mind, of balance, and inner harmony. I lose patience. I acquire doubt and debt.

I am in the process of creating a masterpiece. I am not referring to any album, book, film or creative endeavor, rather, I am referring to the process of self-realization that aligns one with their highest and innermost ideals and values and renders them fully alive. It is a process of overcoming the obstacles imposed upon self, by self, perhaps society, and a fearful mind that refuses to accept the upward spiral of being. What I have chosen to embrace within myself are the very values I caught glimpses of as a kid when I questioned how a world so beautifully diverse in it's simplicity could be made violently complex by the check-points and regulations of man in his quest to control and manipulate the forces of love and nature for the sake of individual gain and power. My decision to live my growth outwardly as an expression of my artistic being, and to earn my living as such, has forced me to engage with a reality that I might have otherwise evaded and has put me up against a cultural perception of entertainment as escapism, which has only enhanced a once non-existent desire to escape. There is no escape. Even my most recent move to Paris has simply shifted something deep within me as I wander through the ancient artifices of ambition, the dome-like cathedrals of clarity, and walled in worlds of art, I feel startlingly closer to my truth and a greater urgency for disciplined transformation. I am growing and have chosen to do so consciously and creatively while remaining engaged with both my inner and outer audience.

I am a reality show, tuning into myself on a daily basis simply to see which emotion tattled on which unchecked ambition. My mind gossips about the actions of my heart. My fears attempt to seduce the cameras for airtime. My soul would vote them off the show. I am checking my habits, re-acquainting myself with age-old disciplines. I am meditating and staying focused (which is a bore for that overactive mind which wishes no more than to follow a trail, any trail to more thoughts, pretty pictures, and inevitably inaction). I am starring in a spin-off of myself where I sing and dance and dress in pomp and costume. I am evolving while simply playing my part. I am staring myself in the eye without flinching or blinking, standing still while moving beyond what holds me in my place. But mostly, I am dancing, everyday, and sleeping perched above the skyline. And I awaken to a new day, a new season, the latest episode....
-Saul Williams

"In this country, you can't propose an alternate system, you can criticize the people in the system. You can say, if we only had a good president everything will be alright. But what a farse that is. A good president is not going to change anything. The system goes marching on..."
-Julian Beck

"I'll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dillitante's and ah... and ah... heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies and the bodies and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds of young men who give what they have to it and give everything they have to it and it's a... it's a term that's based on contempt, it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism and everything that's rotten about rock'n'roll. I don't know Johnny Rotten but I'm sure... I'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did. You see, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise is in fact the brilliant music of a genius, myself . And that music is so powerful that it's quite beyond my control and ah... when I'm in the grips of it I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever felt like that? When you just couldn't feel anything and you didn't want to either. You know? Like that? Do you understand what I'm saying sir?"
-IGGY POP

"I just knew that what I was doing was extremely honest. It was all the things I wanted my music to be."
-Justin Vernon (Bon Iver)

Aside from the "quiet subversion" you mentioned, what do you see as the touchstones of the Giles look?

I don't think there is a look, per se. I mean, Giles is never about, you know, conjuring some kind of downtown style. I like clothes that have a distinct personality-statement clothes, I guess I'd say. Accessible eccentric. Each garment is unique. The fabrication, the print, the cut.
-Giles Deacon, Interview with Style.com

"We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us" 
-Charles Bukowski

"I think we are all kids, no matter what age you are. And it's great to be a kid, psychologists have shown that kids laugh more than twice as much as adults. I feel that what we call adulthood is overrated, impossible, not really true. We simultaneously over-value and put down children. It's time to fight back."
-Mike Mills

"The trouble with graphic design today is: when can you believe it? It's not the message of the designer anymore. Every applied artist ends up selling his or her soul at some point. I haven't done it and look at me. People call me one of the most famous designers in the world and I haven't got any money."
-Peter Saville

"...when in doubt make no sense, non-sense is good."
-modulations (documentary on the history of sound)

"if you're not embarrasing yourself, you're not doing anything"
-Allen Ginsberg

What is STYLE?

Style is the answer to everything.
Fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous day.
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without style.
To do a dangerous thing with style, is what I call art.
Bullfighting can be an art.
Boxing can be an art.
Loving can be an art.
Opening a can of sardines can be an art.
Not many have style.
Not many can keep style.
I have seen dogs with more style than men.
Although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.
When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun, that was style.
For sometimes people give you style.
Joan of Arc had style. John the Baptist. Jesus. Socrates. Caesar. García Lorca.
I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is a difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water, or you, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.
-Charles Bukowski

Architectural Record: It's not fashionable to talk about beauty, but in looking at your buildings, I think about it. What is the role of beauty in your work?

Tadao Ando: There is a role and function for beauty in our time. In Japan it may be translated into the concept of Uskuji, which also means a beautiful life, that is, how a person lives--his or her inner life. It's something beyond appearance, or what only meets the eye. You can't really say what is beautiful about a place, but the image of the place will remain vividly with you. People tend not to use this word beauty because it's not intellectual-but there has to be an overlap between beauty and intellect.

thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
- goethe

there is no chicken.
there is no road to cross.
there is no other side.
- robert metrick

grasp at nothing / resist nothing
- jack kornfield

what we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.
- jung

"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."
- Bob Dylan

W.K.: Have you heard of that quote by this guy Friedrich Schiller, "Keep true to the dreams of thy youth"? That quote changed my life, and I only heard it a few months ago. It confirmed that every crazy thing I'd ever done at least was staying true to the dreams of my youth-and really, I mean very young dreams 
of just being able to have fun all the time.

SWEENEY: The spirit of that makes a lot of sense to me. Someone asked me the other day what success is. There is that Joseph Campbell quote that says "follow your bliss."

In Pruitt's show, Rumspringa serves as a metaphor for Pruitt's art-making process: changing and mixing styles at will and experimenting without constraint.

"I don't like New York as much as I love California."
- David Hockney

a great idea looks simple, but you have to find it first.
- Marcel Marceau

"You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred."
-Woody Allen

[ 2010-09-03 ] : IN CONVERSATION WITH YAYOI KUSAMA
What do you have faith in?
I will be living my life with vigor as I have been, as long as I breathe, putting my all into it. 
I spend everyday believing in the vitality of art.

What is the best example of Art really changing the world for the better?

There are many examples of art contributing to changing the world for the better.
I hope to see the future Earth shining with peace and hope for love, through the efforts of the countries and people of the world. 
I want to create a glorious world by overcoming wars, terror and poverty.

Why should we change the world?

There are many people in various parts of the world who are suffering from problems such as wars, poverty, among others. 
I want to hear songs in praise of humanity fill the entire universe. 
To this end, I am creating artwork everyday with all my strength.

What does success mean to you?

Sending out messages about life and death to the people fills my heart with deep emotion.

What unique gifts do you have to offer to this world?

Over the past several decades, I have been calling out love forever from the bottom of my heart. Many of my enthusiastic fans have warmly accepted my art, pinning their hope on it.

Are we anywhere near where we need to be?

To get to where we need to be, I think we should make steady efforts everyday no matter how long it takes. 
Against the background of the infinitude of the universe and the mystery beyond it, I want to prove the time of today and life in the infinity of life.
This is my wish for a process toward life and death that emerges from the space of hope with the power of my own.

What do you think happens when we die?

Death disappears in the endless universe, carrying with it the life of humanity.

Why are we alive at all? 
It is after all a very strange state to find ourselves in.
My answer to this question is that we want to establish our own presence in a wonderful way.

What is the one thing about you that undermines all the opinions you have made above?

That is my glorification of art and the brilliance of everlasting life. In the brightly shining quietude of time, we want to build up beautifully a splendorous life.

Its about girls who sleep in abandoned cars and set things on fire.
Its about the great things in life.
The stars in the sky and lots of malt liquor.
-Harmony Korine

He teaches me that the feeling is all that matters. That you shouldn't worry about form, or perfection, or making sense, or being reasonable. He is another person out there in the world saying, trust your unconscious, it's the best thing you've got going. Harvest was recorded in his house, he was very out on his own, following his own strange rules, reminds me of punk-rock in a weird way and I always think about how he made this record.
-Mike Mills on Neil Young

"ONE OF THE IMPORTANT THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT MAKING WATERCOLORS WAS NOT TO WORRY, NOT TO CARE TOO MUCH. I THINK IT WAS PICASSO WHO SAID, 'NOT EVERY PICTURE HAS TO BE A MASTERPIECE.' PRECISELY. TO PAINT IS THE THING." 
- HENRY MILLER, THE ANGEL IS MY WATERMARK

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."
-Chuck Close

"Nothing succeeds like excess" 
-Oscar Wilde

"I have always hoped to confuse people and confound people so that they can't put a label on me. That's one reason I like to do different things... go in what looks like wide shifts of direction. People don't know what to expect from me."
-Sting

"I never believed that U2 wanted to save the whales. I don't believe that The Beastie Boys are ready to lay it down for Tibet."
-Iggy Pop

Massimiliano Gioni: Why refuse figuration? What is it that you are reacting against?
Urs Fischer: There's always a moment when things feel obsolete and then it's time for a shave.
MG: So what do you think we need to get over?
UF: For example, there's a recent movement of folkish escapism.
MG: Could you elaborate on that?
UF: What I mean is that there has been a tendency in culture - white, urban Western culture - to go backwards, into a romantic role-playing. You look at most recent art or music or film: it seems to be that to play the role of the creator has become the actual act of creation. It seems that the artist believes in the genre itself, rather than the genre as a vehicle. It's confusing. Look, basically, you're on duty - every artist is on duty. It's a matter of tempering your self-indulgence. "Don't get high on your own supply." What I hate about doing art is that it never gives me a lasting satisfaction.

Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan's poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff. This was California. You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. California has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness-openness to new possibilities.
-Steve Jobs, Playboy Magazine 1985

?"If you do good work for good clients, it will lead to more good work for other good clients. If you do bad work for bad clients it will lead to more bad work for other bad clients."
-Massimo Vignelli

Matt Tyrnauer deemed him, "one of the few people in business who has the courage to do exactly what he wants whenever he wants to." (About Benedict Taschen, the book publisher)

"If you're not too worried about things adding up or not then it all starts to get more interesting. You feel more open."
-Chris Ofili

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it." 
- Jim Jarmusch

"Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don't get out much. It's true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well." 
- Tom Waits

"My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day." 
- Tom Waits

"I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas." 
- Tom Waits

"You're innocent when you dream."
- Tom Waits

What websites do you use for inspiration?
"I look inside myself and what I've learned about life, always, for inspiration. The last place for any graphic communicator to look for inspiration is inside a fucking computer."
- George Lois

Tobias is interested in contrast; something/nothing, function/form, art as monumental/incidental. He is uncomfortable with his place in the art and design world and says of his work "I don't want to make 'art' or 'design' necessarily...it's just stuff...extra stuff in the world...art galleries and design showrooms are places were I have been able to do what I do...but that doesn't make what I do either."
Much of Tobi's work can be seen fundamentally as conceptual art; art as idea, where what we view is the vehicle for an idea. He is continually questioning the notion of authorship, the role of the artist and value of art/his art. Tobi is uncomfortable with "uniqueness and preciousness" as well as ownership. Many of his works have associations with design. Tobi says that one of the things he likes about design is that more people can own it than "lets say a sort of unique sculpture."
-On Tobias Wong, designer. RIP

On Tom Waits:
His philosophy was, "If I keep being a moving target, I can't get hit." He never wanted to be the same again.

So before I had the nerve to think of myself as a film director I was a graphic designer, But really I've always found it invigorating and organic to do many things at once. Especially in the film-design-art worlds I live in, most of the categories that divide up that spectrum are really just careers constructed by art schools, or cultural institutions that don't reflect how the personal creative brain works or how being creative in society works. Years ago when I was mostly doing design and film seemed like a far-off-all-too-complicated-dream, I found this book in Tokyo and began my love for Ohashi's drawings - so juicy and sexy and liberated and odd. It was a sweet surprise to feel his influence as I started doing some of the drawings for BEGINNERS - and I began to think of some of the girls I drew as a "hello" to Mr. Ohashi.
-Mike Mills

"The body doesn't lie. When you are an actor or somebody that is creative, you have to give more room to the instinct. So when I'm performing it's because I feel that I have to do that and only that, because the body said so."
-Javier Bardem

The prosecution is asking Ginsberg to explain/defend his sexually explicit "Love Poem on Theme by Whitman," and Ginsberg here tells of what he channeled from Walt Whitman...

"UNLESS THERE IS AN INFUSION OF FEELING, OF TENDERNESS, OF FEARLESSNESS, OF SPIRITUALITY, OF NATURAL SEXUALITY, OF NATURAL DELIGHT IN EACH OTHER'S BODIES, INTO THE HARDENED, MATERIALISTIC, CYNICAL, LIFE-DENYING, CLEARLY COMPETITIVE, AFRAID, SCARED, ARMORED BODIES, THERE WILL BE NO CHANCE FOR SPIRITUAL DEMOCRACY TO TAKE PLACE IN AMERICA."

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
-Oscar Wilde

"his paintings were so good that upon walking out of the museum i said, "the sun disappoints me so."
-captain beefheart

"For something to be beautiful it doesn't have to be pretty."
Rei Kawakubo

"Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire."
Henry Miller

"I'm not an alcoholic, I'm just a big drinker, and yes, there's a difference." 
Sean Penn

"This rage came with a certain bleakness. Where contemporaries like Tupac and Ghostface used pain as a motivation or impasse, Big had long since resigned himself to an epic, insurmountable sadness on and off record. Biggie's songs are overwhelmed with misery, paranoia and regret. He bragged about money and fashion callously, but never seemed passionate about it or moved by material possessions. A former drug dealer who never outgrew the mentality of constant hustle, Big was burdened first by the streets, and then visibly suffocated by fame and industry. "Mo' Money Mo' Problems," arguably his most blissful song, was about how horrible it is being rich. Filmed posthumously, the video is shot in blinding colors while Puff and Mase prance around in shiny suits, but it's also cut with clips from one of the most harrowing interviews of Big's career: "The more money you make, the more problems you get and jealousy and envy just comes with the territory. It's just negative energy," he wheezes, making zero eye contact with the camera, his head cocked back so far that it seems like his neck can't support it. And sure, "Juicy" sustains its presence as a canonical uplifting classic (and an I-made-it-through-first-semester-and-it's-all-good frat party anthem), but listeners seem to forget that it falls squarely in the middle of an album about a suicidal downfall. Truly, the only pure joy he showed on records seemed to come when he rhymed about fucking.

But this apparent seriousness in the booth stands in stark contrast to his real life personality. By all accounts, Big was a jovial and hilarious presence. This duality isn't a disconnect as much as it is an easy misinterpretation. On record, Big's darkness was his humor, his hardest lines effectively being over the top and the blackest of jokes."
-Andrew Noz on Notorious BIG. Fader Magazine 2011.

"Mo' Money Mo' Problems"
-B.I.G

"I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you."
-Bukowski

You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have.
-Bukowski

I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.
-Bukowski

Writing was never work for me. It had been the same for as long as I could remember: turn on the radio to a classical music station, light a cigarette or a cigar, open the bottle. The typer did the rest. All I had to do was be there. The whole process allowed me to continue when life itself offered very little, when life itself was a horror show. There was always the typer to soothe me, to talk to me, to entertain me, to save my ass. Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.
-Bukowski

your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
-Bukowski

Failure is potential without any more time.
-Alain de Botton

Where you hate and envy most, that is where the clues are to what you should do next.
-Alain de Botton

Success is a reduction in the number of people capable of torturing you with envy.
-Alain de Botton

be not like them
and you will
survive.
- Charles Bukowski

turning what might seem like life's debris into the transcendental. 
-mike mills

"the limits of my languag

"One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things." 
- Henry Miller

"You'll die young if you live so carefully."

"I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself." -Diane Arbus

"The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist."
David Hockney

"If everything seems under control you're not going fast enough." - Mario Andretti

"The only time I've ever made a difference, and the only time anything ever changes, is really when you're respectful and disrespectful at the same time." - Marc Jacobs

GO: I mean, it's like not every woman can buy a Chanel couture gown, but every woman can buy a Chanel lipstick.

MJ: I think that's totally true. You go to Japan and these artists have merchandise-they make chocolates! They do everything. They don't care!

GO: But they weren't trained that it's a very naughty thing, like we were in the States by a peculiar coalition of dealers and ivory-tower critics.

MJ: You can go to Graff and buy a diamond that's flawless. You aren't going to be able to buy the same diamond at Fortunoff, but it's still a diamond you can enjoy. If fashion can allow you to have the Chanel mystique through a lipstick, then why shouldn't art allow you to have that through a sweatshirt that says "Cremaster" on it?

GO: One of the things that people really didn't get was when Andy talked about business art. He was saying, "I think if I were starting all over, I would do business." When I went to L.A. for the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and then saw the Murakami show at MOCA, I thought, Wow, Andy would be so jealous. He'd be so jealous that Koons and Murakami have, like, 200 people working for them-Andy never had more than 50.

MJ: Yeah!

GO: They are the fulfillment of everything he was talking about. He saw that we live in a corporate world and that there's nothing wrong with an artist using corporate techniques to work. You don't have to starve at your easel alone in the garret.

MJ: Yeah!
-Conversation between Glenn O'Brian and Marc Jacobs

To achieve great things, two things are needed. A plan and not quite enough time.--Leonard Bernstein

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work". -Gustave Flaubert

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Mr Buckminster Fuller

Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get. - Ray Kroc

You got to have it - James Brown

"Art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take risks."
- Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb manifesto, published in 1943 in the New York Times.

This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. -Mark Rothko

"I always ... treat [art] as an all-or-nothing situation. There's no way I'm going to settle for half." 
-Damien Hirst

Kelley's career began at a time when the artists who had great success generally tended toward repeating themselves, creating a signature look that functioned like a brand or a band. But then Kelley's generation-or let's say, the best minds of Kelley's generation-broke away from that trademarkaholic tendency. They weren't afraid to put up a show that didn't resemble the last, that changed it's mind or lost it. Kelley's style might appear to be all over the place--Jerry Saltz termed his aesthetic "clusterfuck"-but I think the point is that Kelley's style isn't so much a look as it is a feel, a groove that combines roots in conceptual art and an unashamed intellectuality with a sensibility steeped in funk. And there's one thing you can't lose, it's that feel.
-Glenn O' Brien

Richard Brautigan: The Wait

The Wait

It seemed
like years
before
I picked
a bouquet
of kisses
off her mouth
and put them
into a dawn-colored vase
in
my
heart.

But
the wait
was worth it.

Because
I
was
in love.

Because no books or comprehensive catalogs document Bennett's work, it is not easy to evaluate his eclectic 65-year career. In the end, however, it may have been Bennett's approach to the creative process that left a mark more enduring than any single object.

''He saw no boundaries and felt he could design everything from a house to a rocket ship,'' Mr. D'Urso said. ''He saw himself as a Renaissance man.''
-about the designer, Ward Bennett

"If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't." - Chuck Palahniuk

"The best way out is always through." - Robert Frost

"After lunch I went over to the Whitney. For some reason I wanted to see the biennial. I'm not sure why. Before checking it out I went up to the fifth floor. That's where they hang work that's in the permanent collection. I'm glad I did. There was gorgeous late fifties Lee Krasner painting hanging in a room of it's own. After staring, I walked down to the fourth floor and it looked like people were exercising on a huge black rubber matt that took up the entire floor. There were maybe fifteen people following the commands of a woman who was talking into a microphone... telling the fifteen people what to do. I think the fifteen people following the commands were people who had walked off the street. They kind of just "joined in". I've heard this type of activity in the art world is called "relational aesthetics"... or something like that... It felt like I was interrupting the "relation". I quickly got out of there. I walked down to the third floor and in the back there was a room filled with an artist's junk. There seems to be a room filled with an aritst's junk in every biennial I've ever been to. I'm not sure why this artist's junk was there. I walked around the corner and there were fifty Dana Shultz paintings on the wall. At least I think they were Shultz's paintings. (I walked by pretty fast). I skipped the second floor and went down to the lobby. What happened to the bookstore? There was none. There were some catalogues thrown out on tables that looked "remaindered"... what was there looked like a bake sale. I walked out of the Whitney having spent less than twenty minutes... fifteen of those standing in front of the Krasner."
-Richard Prince

"Humor heightens our sense of survival and preserves our sanity." - Charlie Chaplin