“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”
— Octavia Butler
“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”
— Octavia Butler
“I picture my journey through life as a circle, as if I am travelling around a sphere, like an orange. I started at the bottom and began to climb up the side, becoming more confident as I went along. Sometimes life got difficult and I was hanging upside down, traversing it as best I could. When I reached the top, I tipped over and began to go down the other side. This part of the journey seems to be going faster. I find I’m drawn to behaviours and people that remind me of my past; even if they’re difficult, they’re familiar. I recognise some of my parents’ traits creeping into my character. My true nature – which I suppressed in order to function and succeed as an adult – is surfacing again. I’m shy and inclined to introversion. Still I keep on travelling to the underside of the orange, no way to stop it.”
— Viv Albertine
Harvey Kurtzman on artist Wallace ‘Wally’ Wood:
“Wally Wood was a workhorse and I feel that Wally devoted himself so intensely to his work that he burned himself out. He overworked his body. That’s my own observation. Wally had a tension in him, an intensity that he locked away in an internal steam boiler, and I always had the feeling that Wally was capable of erupting — which he apparently did occasionally — but he had that quality of frustration and tension and I think it ate away his insides and the work really used him up. I think he delivered some of the finest work that was ever drawn, and I think it’s to his credit that he put so much intensity into his work at great sacrifices to himself.”
“Be kind, be involved, believe in your art… At a time when people tell you art is not important, that is always the prelude to fascism. When they tell you it doesn’t matter, when they tell you a fucking app can do art you say, if it’s that important, why the fuck do they want it so bad? The answer is because they think they can debase everything that makes us a little better, a little more human. And that, in my book, and in my life, includes monsters.”
— Guillermo del Toro
“There are a lot of ways in which the destructive forces around us want us to be consumers, want us to be malleable and gullible. Anything that makes us something else—somebody with a robust sense of self, somebody with a sense of pleasure, somebody with independence of thought—is not the revolution itself, but it might help reinforce the character who can resist…
Being disconnected from curiosity about the production of things, from independent thought and investigation, from understanding the systems around you—that makes you a better subject of totalitarianism.”
— Rebecca Solnit (via)
“I always say that I basically make my work “to order”, by which I mean to my “inner order”. It is really inside me, what’s going to come out. The way I see it, each individual accumulates in his or her lifetime. That which accumulates inside him or her needs to find a way out. Basically, everybody can do that, but most people do not find a way of releasing it, they have certain blockage. There is no such thing as talent.
The artist is able to reach their resources, and overcome the block. But a clerk who sits in the office, obviously, has his blockage and cannot. This so-called “professionalism”, is much more a matter of technique, or skill than creativity. You can see that in naive art, or folk art, if an individual wants to express him or herself, they find a way to do it if they really want to.”
— Jan Švankmajer (via)
“I’m not very precious about my work. If I see something of mine that’s been stolen I get pissed, of course. But otherwise artists and designers all learn from each other. Most ideas have been done before so you just have to keep doing them in a better way. We all learn from the past so the best thing to do is just keep discovering things.”
— Seymour Chwast (via)
“When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it is because it is deeply unsettled. And I think about this a lot right now because I think that, you know, this promise of an artificial intelligence future is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy powerful people have about how well they’re going to be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future’s already settled, AI is already here, the end is already here, then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse.
I mean, their proposal for a post-human future is one where there will be human beings who will just be treated inhumanely. We’re not going to stop making people or humans. They’re just saying we are not going to treat you as humans. And I refuse.”
— Tressie McMillan Cottom
“You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson – she’s probably the top. Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have – who’ve gotten me through the narrow straits of life.”
— Maurice Sendak (via)
“I’m afraid that for a few years now, I have felt that since I am apparently not allowed to own the work that I created in the same manner that an author in a more grown-up and worthwhile field might expect to do, and since my protests at having my work stolen from me are interpreted by a surely young-at-heart and non-unionised audience as evidence of my “grouchiness” and “cantankerousness”, then the only active position that is left to me is to disown the works in question. I no longer own copies of these books and, other than the earnest creative work that I put into them at the time, my only associations with these works are broken friendships, perfectly ordinary corporate betrayals and wasted effort. Given that I will certainly never be reading any of these works again and that I have no wish to see them or even to think of them, it follows that I don’t wish to discuss them, sign copies of them or, indeed, have anything to do with them. As I would hope should be obvious, to separate emotionally from work that you were previously very proud of is quite a painful experience and is not undertaken lightly.”
— Alan Moore (via)