“For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.”

Sir Isaiah Berlin, “The Fox And The Hedgehog”, 1953

(via Matt M at Lost Tempo)

  “When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”

― Pablo Picasso

 “Don’t waste the time. Time is the final currency. Not money, not power - it’s time.”

David Crosby

"We started being a rock band dabbling in drugs and ended up a drug band dabbling in rock" 

Ozzy Osbourne

 "Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it."

- Andrei Tarkovsky

 “The English excel in dancing and music for they are active and lively. They are vastly fond of great noises that fill the air, such as the firing of cannon, drums and the ringing of bells. So that it is common for a number of them when drunk to go up into some belfry and ring the bells for hours together.”

- Paul Hentzner, Travels In England During The Reign Of Queen Elizabeth, 1598

 “Nobody should be playing rock and roll anymore—no exceptions. It’s about as urgently needed—as opposed to socially, culturally compulsory—as making papier-maché frog masks. It was possibly once needed, but that was before it was everywhere— when you didn’t hear it in supermarkets or coming out of every Mercedes at a stoplight—before ‘rock-surround.’ What we need now is to turn it off. What was once liberating has become irredeemably oppressive. It exists to make you stupid— like sitcoms or the news or college football or your parents, for crying out loud.”

-- Richard Meltzer, 1998