"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by answers." 
- James Baldwin

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically,
in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. 
I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. 
Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. 
Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, 
and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. 
No more walls."
- Anais Nin

"Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!
The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul!
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!"
- Allen Ginsberg, footnote from Howl

"O incomparable Giver of life, cut reason loose at last!
Let it wander grey-eyed from vanity to vanity.
Shatter open my skull, pour in it the wine of madness!
Let me be mad, as You; mad with You, with us.
Beyond the sanity of fools is a burning desert
Where Your sun is whirling in every atom:
Beloved, drag me there, let me roast in perfection!"
- Rumi

"Art is the perception of the world by a different, irrational way.
The way is intuition, inspirational guessing."
- Valery Brusov

"Nevertheless he too was a rebel: rebelling even against his class. Or perhaps rebel is too strong a word; far too strong. He was only caught in the general, popular recoil of the young against convention and against any sort of real authority. Fathers were ridiculous: his own obstinate one supremely so. And governments were ridiculous: our own wait-and-see sort especially so. And armies were ridiculous, and old buffers of generals altogether, the red-faced Kitchener supremely. Even the war was ridiculous, though it did kill rather a lot of people. In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous: certainly everything connected with authority, whether it were in the army or the government or the universities, was ridiculous to a degree."
- D. H. Lawrence, from Lady Chatterley's Lover

"Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dalí."
- Salvador Dalí

"The theatre is a school of weeping and of laughter, a free forum, where men can question norms that are outmoded or mistaken and explain with living example the eternal norms of the human heart."
- Federico Garcia Lorca

"Art has a spiritual ministry. It can raise and sanctify everything it touches, and popular disapproval must not impede its progress. Art is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament. Art is what makes the life of the whole race immortal." 
- Oscar Wilde

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."
- Martha Graham

"I don't do drugs. I am drugs."
- Salvador Dalí

"The arts are the only civilizing influences in the world, and without them people are barbarians. An aesthetic education, which humanizes people, is far more important even for politicians than an economic education, which does the opposite."
- Oscar Wilde

“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. 
He hears nothing, sees nothing, takes no part in political life.
He doesn't seem to know that the cost of living, the price of beans, of flour, of rent, of medicines, all depend on political decisions. He even prides himself on his political ignorance, sticks out his chest and says he hates politics.  He doesn't know, the imbecile, that from his political non-participation comes the prostitute, the abandoned child, the robber and, worst of all, corrupt officials, the lackey's of exploitative multinational corporations." 
- Bertolt Brecht

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
- Elie Wiesel

“Never let me lose the marvel
of your statue-like eyes,
or the accent the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.
I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.
If you are my hidden treasure,
if you are my cross, my dampened pain,
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,
never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.”
― Federico García Lorca

"My performers do not repeat, they try again."
- Pina Bausch

“Only put off until tomorrow
what you are willing to die having left undone.” 
― Pablo Picasso.

"Write drunk; edit sober."
- Earnest Hemingway

“I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, 
every atom of me in magnificent glow, 
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.”
- Jack London

"Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. 
If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now. Or can be. This isn’t that it’s fiction’s duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I’m not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art. We’ve all got this “literary” fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like “Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!” But we already “know” U.S. culture is materialistic. 
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines.  It doesn’t engage anybody. 
What’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not why not?"
 - David Foster Wallace

"My application’s not bought... 
I am not just a boy who plays tennis. 
I have an intricate history. 
Experiences and feelings. 
I’m complex... 
I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. 
Some of them are interesting... 
I’m not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, 
bred for a function."
- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

"ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, 
and now you're really in the total animal soup of time-"
- Allan Ginsberg, from Howl

"A debt is a promise corrupted by both math and violence." 
- David Graeber

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. "
- E. V. Debs,  Statement to the Court upon being convicted of violating the Sedition Act, 1918

“I pledge allegiance to the living 
and I will defend art from history. 
I will rescue art from the future, 
from its attrition into taste, 
and from the speculative notion 
that it will become more valuable with time.”
- Rene Ricard

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." 
- Samuel Beckett

“For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.” 
- T.S. Eliot

"And what good does all the research of the impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank."
- Frank O'Hara, "Having a Coke with You"

"Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and find it."
- Oscar Wilde

"When in doubt, be precise."
- Anne Bogart

"We can never be resigned. I think the feeling of resignation, of being unable to care, is the end stage of depression, perhaps of shock. I'm not sure, even though I've coursed through every emotional stage there is. But resignation is unacceptable. Resignation is that calm people are alleged to feel right before they freeze to death or drown. It is a giving up, and the act of giving up is decidedly anti-human. We do not give up. We can wail and we can joke and we can cry, but we have to do something. When the world appears to be most insane, we can't go inside and hide and let the jackals eat up the orchards. We have to respond as humans, which is to say with kindness and wit and caring. We do not--ever--give up. So pull yourself together and get back to work. "
- Tennessee Williams, 1982

"Listen, Agnes. I am working-class. And that really does make a difference. I know what's useful, and what isn't. I know the price of things, and I know how to give things up. I know what it is to struggle– these tough little lessons, I don't think you people ever learned. I hold tight, and I do my work. I make posters for good causes. Even if they get torn up, I make them, even though we live in a country where theory falls silent in the face of fact, where progress can be reversed overnight, where the enemy has stolen everything, our own words from us. I hold tight, and not to my painting... not only to that. Pick any era in history, Agnes. What is really beautiful about that era? The way the rich lived? No. The way the poor lived? No. The dreams of the Left are always beautiful. The imaginings of a better world, the damnation of the present one. This faith, this luminescent anger, these alone are worthy of being called human. These are the Beautiful that an age produces. As an artist I am struck to the heart by these dreams. These visions. We progress. But at great cost. How can anyone live without understanding that much?" - Tony Kushner, from A Bright Room Called Day