“If l could cut from my brain the phantom of competition, the ego-center of self-consciousness, and become a vehicle, a pure vehicle of others, the outer word. My interest in other people is too often one of comparison, not of pure intrigue with the unique otherness of identity. Here, ideally, I should forget the outer world of appearances, publishing, checks, success. And be true to an inner heart. Yet I fight against a simple-mindedness, a narcissism, a protective shell against competing, against being found wanting.

To write for itself, to do things for the joy of them. What a gift of the gods.”

— Sylvia Plath

“The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things. And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves—they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation.

This might sound like I believe there is some vast conspiracy at work, which I don’t, but the situation we find ourselves in is effectively the same as if there were one. The way we are taught about music, and the way it’s socially and economically positioned, affect whether it’s integrated (or not) into our lives, and even what kind of music might come into existence in the future. Capitalism tends toward the creation of passive consumers, and in many ways this tendency is counterproductive. Our innovations and creations, after all, are what keep many seemingly unrelated industries alive.”

— David Byrne

“I don’t pay much attention to what people say about me. I mean, not being on the Internet, I don’t have much idea how I’m seen. I refuse to be a celebrity. Neither am I some superhuman being of limitless potential or extraordinary intellect. I am somebody from a very humble background who never had an education or any real intellectual stimulation.

I’d like to say that people don’t realize how normal I am, but I can’t say that with a straight face, can I? (long wheezing laughter) I think me and Mr. Normal parted company a considerable distance back.”

— Alan Moore

“Beauty is a very difficult word: I have already complained about not being able to approach it straight on. People don’t use the word as freely as they used to, and many artists – painters, sculptors, photographers, architects, poets – reject it entirely; they deny that there is any common standard by which to judge it; they diminish it to mean prettiness and so righteously despise it; or they deliberately abandon it for truth, or self-expression, or edginess, or other values they prize more highly.

I don’t pretend to be able to argue with such refusals of beauty when I can’t even offer a generally acceptable definition of the word. But I think it behooves artists to consider what the word means to them, no matter what it means to others. How do they interpret the aesthetic component of what they do, its importance, its weight? What, besides that component, makes it appropriate to call their work art? What, besides the search to make something beautiful, makes an artist? There are perhaps as many answers to those questions now as there are artists, and nothing gives me the right to ask them of others, but I do feel the obligation to ask them of myself, and answer as honestly as I can.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“I remember when I was a kid, watching the Johnny Carson show – having a good time, laughing with Johnny. And he’s telling a joke to Ed McMahon about broads. I’m laughing until all of a sudden it occurs to me that I’m that thing he’s calling a broad. The joke’s on me. Most people internalize this kind of humiliation throughout their lives and it works to determine their notions of self-esteem and their productive capacities. But, if you start viewing these moments critically, you can begin to alter these conditions, you can begin to create a different kind of spectator: one who might be intent on beginning to represent himself or herself rather than always being represented.”

— Barbara Kruger

“I witness a beauty in the form or coloring of the clouds which addresses itself to my imagination, for which you account scientifically to my understanding, but do not so account to my imagination. It is what it suggests and is the symbol of that I care for, and if, by any trick of science, you rob it of its symbolicalness, you do me no service and explain nothing. I, standing twenty miles off, see a crimson cloud in the horizon. You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays and reflects the red, but that is nothing to the purpose, for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood, makes my thoughts flow, and I have new and indescribable fancies, and you have not touched the secret of that influence. If there is not something mystical in your explanation, something unexplainable to the understanding, some elements of mystery, it is quite insufficient. If there is nothing in it which speaks to my imagination, what boots it? What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination? not merely robs Peter to pay Paul, but takes from Peter more than it ever gives to Paul? That is simply the way in which it speaks to the understanding, and that is the account which the understanding gives of it; but that is not the way it speaks to the imagination, and that is not the account which the imagination gives of it. Just as inadequate to a pure mechanic would be a poet’s account of a steam-engine.

If we knew all things thus mechanically merely, should we know anything really?”

— Henry David Thoreau