“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
— Mary Oliver
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
— Mary Oliver
“Actually, it’s when you see too little that you run the risk of being influenced. If you see a lot, you can choose the films you want to be influenced by. Sometimes the choice isn’t conscious, but there are some things in life that are far more powerful than we are, and that affect us profoundly.”
— Jacques Rivette
“It puzzled women who wore sensible stuff dresses why Emily wore white the year around. Various fantastic tales were circulated about her. Sometimes such stories made us laugh; more often they made us hate the stupidity that invented them. She puzzled those people she was not just like, simply because she was not like everybody else of that day and place. ‘Self-expression’ was not in vogue in her day. It was hard to put up with in a country village. Why should she wear white? What good reason was there for her not doing exactly what everybody else did? What was she making a mystery about? And the only person who never thought of it as a mystery was Emily herself, as she moved about her father’s house and garden. They could no more approach her than they could make the moon come down and sit on their parlor sofas!”
— Martha Dickinson Bianchi on Emily Dickinson
An excerpt from an interview with artist Bill Morrison on his work in key art from Comic Book Creator #7:
“Initially I was hired at an advertising agency named B.D. Fox and Friends. It was a boutique agency that catered to the movie industry. I was hired as an in-house illustrator and… I don’t wanna say “jack of all trades” but within the scope of illustration and retouching, I pretty much did everything. But I wasn’t very well established. I was still pretty young, so mostly what I got to work on were comps. I would do little thumbnail comps, you know, just little ideas that the designers would hand me. We would watch the film, whatever it was, and they would feed me some ideas and I would draw them up. Sometimes I would get to do a finished illustration but it wouldn’t be the final poster. They’d have an outside freelance artist — somebody who was more established — to do the final. But whenever there was a really low-budget product that they knew they weren’t really going to make any money on, they would throw that to me so I got to do a ton of illustrations for these really low-budget films, like for drive-in movies or direct-to-video releases. Video was just coming in, so it was a lot of direct-to-video schlocky horror and teen sex comedies.
The one that people remember the most and has the highest profile was for House, the horror movie with William Katt. I painted that image. You know, the severed, rotting hand pressing the doorbell? That actually won an award from The Hollywood Reporter. That was probably the one people remember the most, but I did some fairly decent ones for some foreign films, like art house movies. There was a film called Choose Me and the image was a very close-up shot or a woman talking on a pink telephone. I remember that being a lot of fun. It was not really cheesecake, but it had that sort of look.
After the first job, at B.D. Fox, I got hired by David Willardson, the illustrator, whose work I admired. I’d seen a lot of his work all through art school. He approached me. He actually saw the Choose Me poster I’d done and asked me if I wanted to do some freelance work. So I did a job, he liked it, made me an offer, and hired me away. It was like going to school and getting paid to go because I learned so much from working in his studio. But that’s where I started doing the Disney work.
Disney wanted a teaser poster for Cinderella, which they were re-releasing. The job just happened to fall to me. I just got lucky and that particular job landed in my desk. I don’t even think Dave knew that | had this affinity for cartoons and comics at that point, but I guess I did a good job on the poster. So, the next one that came in was the main release poster for Cinderella and I got to do that. Everybody liked it. Disney liked it, so from that point on, I was the cartoon guy in the studio. We just started getting a steady stream of work from Disney.
Most of the posters were for re-releases because, at that time, Disney was re-releasing probably at least two films per year back into theaters and then coming out with a brand new film. The first new film I worked on was Oliver and Company and then The Little Mermaid. I guess that was ’88 or ’87. I did the original Little Mermaid, Rescuers Down Under. I did the poster for Rollercoaster Rabbit, which was a Roger Rabbit cartoon that appeared with Dick Tracy. My goal at the time, I thought, if I do this long enough and Disney keeps re-releasing these films in theaters, it would be cool to have done a poster for every Disney feature film!”
“At any moment, we think, we are free to do whatever we want. But our supposedly free choices are governed by our past actions. If we do not understand ourselves, how can we expect to make a free choice? Only by seeing and accepting the past can we free ourselves from it.”
— Rachel Pollack
“The mind at times fashions for itself false shapes of evil when there are no signs that point to any evil; it twists into the worst construction some word of doubtful meaning; or it fancies some personal grudge to be more serious than it really is, considering not how angry the enemy is, but to what lengths he may go if he is angry. But life is not worth living, and there is no limit to our sorrows, if we indulge our fears to the greatest possible extent; in this matter, let prudence help you, and contemn with a resolute spirit even when it is in plain sight. If you cannot do this, counter one weakness with another, and temper your fear with hope. There is nothing so certain among these objects of fear that it is not more certain still that things we dread sink into nothing and that things we hope for mock us. Accordingly, weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer. And if fear wins a majority of the votes, incline in the other direction anyhow, and cease to harass your soul, reflecting continually that most mortals, even when no troubles are actually at hand or are certainly to be expected in the future, become excited and disquieted.”
— Seneca
“How does one get the ‘subaltern demon’ inside oneself to be quiet? Sonyichka, I don’t know any way other than to link up with the cheerfulness and beauty of life which are always around us everywhere, if one only knows how to use one’s eyes and ears, and thus to create an inner equilibrium and rise above everything petty and annoying.”
— Rosa Luxemburg (letter from prison)
“It’s hard to say which ones had an influence on me because, on a conscious level, I never tried to make use of someone else’s experience. There are film directors who are dear to me because of their existence and visual system. I feel a great affinity for them, and there is a big chance that, in one way or another, they influenced or continue to influence my own perceptions in cinema.”
— Larisa Shepitko
“The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as ‘Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as ‘a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.'”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“The things you love and revisit become a mirror to yourself across time.”
— Maya Cade