“That’s where it begins and ends for me and these songs were the ones that touched me the deepest. It was like I was laying hold of some part of me that I didn’t even know was there until I let it out.”
-Etta James
“Never apologize, never explain - didn’t we always say that? Well, I haven’t and I don’t.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I don’t want to be remembered as a person with Aids, I want to be remembered as a person with ideas.” - Leigh Bowery
If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
- Kurt Vonnegut
“I enjoyed my life when I had nothing… and kinda like the idea of just being happy with me.”
“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”
― Patti Smith
“I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids
“Back in the early 30s, Woody and Lead Belly were musical cronies. At all the New York folk-song parties of that day - and the guitar picking population of New York at that time consisted of about ten people, if you can believe it - Lead Belly and Woody were the stars. And usually after all of us had decided to go to bed, Woody would go home with Lead Belly and they’d sit up and play until morning.”
- Alan Lomax
“Some people will tell you that slow is good – but I’m here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba…”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
