Simple Love And its Complications
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…The truth is I don’t understand or care about competition, I can’t even understand what Hemingway and his counterpart Mailer are referring to when they talk about facing another talent in the ring. As far as I know, no work of art has ever moved to another work of art; the living do not compete with the dead, nor the living.
— Joyce Carol Oates
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To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not rich. To listen to stars and birds and babes and sages with an open heart. To study hard, think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions. Never hurry. In a word, to let the spiritual, the unbidden and the unconscious rise up through the common. This is my symphony.
— William Henry Channing, My Symphony
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My work is about the fragility of living and the difficulty of loving and being loved… The unconscious is brought to consciousness through art. My art is a way to exorcise demons that haunt me since childhood… The only real art that I’ve practiced all my life has been the art of battling depression, emotional addiction… Conquering fear is what am interested in…
— Louise Bourgeois, from Father Destruction
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Ever wondered what coffee is? Coffee is an excuse. An excuse to tell a friend that you love them.
— Luciano De Crescenzo
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Creativity based on competition seems like a contradiction in terms. We imagine creative people are motivated by anything but competition and it’s a little disappointing to learn that they often have an eye cocked at their contemporaries’ level of success. Resources are sparse, after all, and starving artists do exist. It’s easy to lose your concentration on truth and beauty and start to worry about the rent. You have to wonder if things are arranged like that on purpose.
It takes some fortitude to pursue what inspires you in a society that’s focused almost exclusively on the mechanics of profit and loss. The slow moving soul is lost in a culture built on speed. A lot gets lost in the sheer velocity of how we live. You don’t get the…
