Thomas Merton Quotes

We want to be presentable and respectable, but feel like we can talk freely about what we want to sing about - we don't need to cuss to have that bad-boy attitude, I guess.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

I see myself as no color. I can play the role of a man. I can paint my face white if I want to and play the role of white. I can play a green, I can be a purple. I think I have that kind of frame and that kind of attitude where I can play an animal. If you think in color, then everyone around you is going to think in color and that puts limits on the way you think. I don't think like that. A lot of the roles that I'm doing are roles that a man or a person of any color can do.

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

I think journalism can come from anywhere, and comedy can certainly come from anywhere.

Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness.

That's where the most beautiful art is always created, when you have someone not worried about what the outcome is.

I am interested in the creativity of the criminal attitude because I recognize in it the existence of a special condition of crazy creativity. A creativity without morals fired only by the energy of freedom and the rejection of all codes and laws. For freedom rejects the dictated roles of the law and of the imposed order and for this reason is isolated.

The great thing about improvisation is that it allows us to establish an uncensored form of theater. Freedom of speech is absolutely inherent to artistic expression.

When you really do feel like an alien, and you really do feel like a space creature, and you really do feel you want to experiment and dress up and be different every day, to find what looks best but never stick to one thing... Just the fact that that was offered to those kids during that time is pretty remarkable.

Dave [Holland] plays the way he wants to play. And it's usually what's needed. You know, Dave is such a deep thinker. You can't tell him too much, else it might spoil his spirit, you know.

What I wanna do with Methods is keep that around as sorta my freak out, creative free for all- anything goes project.

In England it is enough for a man to try and produce any serious, beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen.

I've always felt like an outsider across the board, since day one. The challenge has been to simply not pay attention to my outsider or insider status and just do the work and play the shows and connect with the people. And not even bother to play this game of keeping score, which is what destroys you.

It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit! . . . I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things - so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.

There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.

I just do whatever I feel. Whatever the beat makes me say, I do that and I run with that.

Anyway, I'm digressing, but this is just kind of this 10-and-a-half-minute, ambient - you hear cicadas and birds and the wind outside and crickets as I'm swelling the piece. I could never do that on a pop record. I could, but why would I want to be agitating?

Imagination is like a lofty building reared to meet the sky; whereas fancy is a balloon that soars at the wind's will.

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.

"Painters and poets," you say, "have always had an equal license in bold invention." We know; we claim the liberty for ourselves and in turn we give it to others.

Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations.

Basically I'm in the idea business -- whether it's a musical idea or a spoken idea ... If you wind up with a political system that wants to put idea men out of business, then you have worry on your hands.

Forgive what you do not approve & love me for this energetic exertion of my talent