" Quotations "

"Just do your work. And if the world needs your work it will come and get you. And if it doesn't, do your work anyway. You can have fantasies about having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I'm given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one's own vision." --Kiki Smith

"Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into a boring life" --Donald Miller

"I have been made so you can use me again and again." --a plastic bag

"I know for an honest to goodness fact that life can kick you to pieces, break you into a thousand little shards, and that you can get up again and mend yourself. I promise." --Nick Lake

"I guess I even feel more freewheeling these days. I definitely feel more philosophically freewheeling. I’m just not so certain that anything I learned or was taught is right. I think experience has made me really scared of absolutes – absolute systems of government, absolute religions, absolute life – all these things I’m incredibly wary of now...I’m just a curious old sod. I just want to know how everything works. I’m a nosy old bastard. I just have to know about things, and I can’t see how anybody can live on this planet and not want to. I get so despondent when people seem to curl up and die. They just don’t have any interest in living anymore. I want to shake them and say, “Look, it’s still great out there!” Every day is great. And to let these days just go by you is a waste of a gift you’ve been given. Life is a gift from God, and to waste it is a great sin. Go do something for somebody else, if you’re bored. Just don’t sit there being a lump." --David Bowie

"Of course, play is equally as important to your education as work. And in the fine arts, play is work, isn’t it? What other field allows you to deduct as business expenses from your taxes gangsta rap, Gaspar Noé’s movies, even vintage porn as long as you use it for research? Remember: You must participate in the creative world you want to become part of. So what if you have talent? Then what? You have to figure out how to work your way inside. Keep up with what’s causing chaos in your own field.
If you’re a visual artist, go see the shows in the galleries that are frantically competing to find the one bad neighborhood left in Manhattan to open up in.
Watch every movie that gets a negative review in the New York Times and figure out what the director did wrong.
Read, read, read!
Watch people on the streets. Spy, be nosy, eavesdrop." --John Waters (read the rest of his commencement address here.