“Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, daß Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben.”
In un appartamento
non mio, in
cui vivo ogni
tanto, una piccola
pianta sofferente: foglie
strette, stanche, disperate
di luce solare
La sposto, la
nutro, la innaffio;
le do anche
ogni tanto, del
caffè (se fa
bene a me …)
Adesso è un’altra:
irriconoscibile, esuberante, foglie
enormi, da giungla;
evidentemente molto contenta
Chissà quante persone
incluso me, passano
la vita ad
essere piccole, insoddisfatte,
inadeguate rispetto alla
propria potenziale bellezza,
non per mancanza
caratteriale; semplicemente perché
non hanno trovato
le persone giuste,
il posto giusto
In 1962, he spent a painstaking day lettering a note to himself on a chest of drawers at the end of his bed. “Get up and work immediately,” it said, and he’s been obeying it ever since.
My dad told me that nothing is make or break – a single moment to change the rest of your life. He said to me: “It doesn’t work like that. If you have a moment like that and you think it’s gone, just keep going. You’ll get another moment.”
The closest I’ve come to death is when I was hit by a car. My mum had let me bunk off school, I went to cross the road, ran before looking and got hit. It felt like poetic justice.
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at the least, when a professional writer doesn’t do anything but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Either write or nothing … I find it works. Two very simple rules, a: you don’t have to write. b: you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.
A good idea that doesn’t happen is no idea at all.
So, what would our natural rhythm look like? What would our sleeping patterns be in the sort of ideal sense? Well, it turns out that when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all, they sleep twice every night. They go to bed around 8:00 p.m. until midnight and then again, they sleep from about 2:00 a.m. until sunrise. And in-between, they have a couple of hours of sort of meditative quiet in bed. And during this time, there’s a surge of prolactin, the likes of which a modern day never sees. The people in these studies report feeling so awake during the daytime, that they realize they’re experiencing true wakefulness for the first time in their lives.
I think that movies are made from the unconscious of the filmmakers, not out of their ego. A good movie comes unconsciously to me.
I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don’t think that’s a painter’s business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.