My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams - like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.

— Hermann Hesse

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People empty me. I have to get away to refill.

— Charles Bukowski

Simon Ungers, Autonomy and Dialogue, 2005

Bobby Fischer in Iceland, 1972

Egon Eiermann and Sep Ruf | Deutscher Pavillon | 1958

Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don't give a damn.

— Charles Bukowski

This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions.

— Ai Weiwei

East Berlin

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

— Jean Paul Sartre

Wherever the crowd goes, run in the other direction. They're always wrong.

— Charles Bukowski

Never marry someone who doesn't love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you.

— Roger Ebert

Why can't you understand? The stars fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Pyongyang

Ever more north.

— Anne Carson

Wir haben erlaubt, dass es so etwas wie Mitbestimmung in der bildenden Kunst gibt. Das war mein größter Fehler.

— Markus Lüpertz

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Ivan's Childhood; dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1962

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

— Roger Ebert

Those who create their own worlds are generally the poets.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Francesca Woodman

You live out the confusions until they become clear.

— Anaïs Nin

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Kim Jong Il looking at things; by Jean Boîte Éditions

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

— Raymond Carver

Gerhard Richter | Administration Building | 1964

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.

— Maya Angelou

Mirror, dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1975

All creative work strives for simplicity, for perfectly simple expression; and this means reaching down into the furthest depths of the recreation of life. But that is the most painful part of creative work: Finding the shortest path between what you want to say or express and its ultimate reproduction in the finished image. The struggle for simplicity is the painful search for a form adequate to the truth you have grasped. You long to be able to achieve great things while economizing the means. The striving for perfection leads an artist to make spiritual discoveries, to exert the utmost moral effort. Aspiration towards the absolute is the moving force in the development of mankind. For me the idea of realism in art is linked with that force. Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is a striving for the truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

I exist in two places, here and where you are.

— Margaret Atwood

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Museum for a Small City | 1941 - 1943

I'm not fascinated by people who smile all the time. What I find interesting is the way people look when they are lost in thought, when their face becomes angry or serious, when they bite their lip, the way they glance, the way they look down when they walk, when they are alone and smoking a cigarette, when they smirk, the way they half smile, the way they try and hold back tears, the way when their face says they want to say something but can't, the way they look at someone they want or love … I love the way people look when they do these things. It's … beautiful.

— Clémence Poésy

If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!

— John Waters

Haus Lange

I am constantly being asked what this or that means in my films. It's unbearable! An artist does not have to be accountable for his intentions. I did not do any deep thinking about my work. I don't know what my symbols mean. I only desire to induce feelings, any feelings, in viewers. People always try to find hidden meanings in my films. But wouldn't it be strange to make a film while striving to hide one's thoughts? My images do not signify anything beyond what they are […] We do not know ourselves that well: Sometimes we express forces which cannot be grasped by any ordinary measure.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

A fundamentalist vision of living a shift of perception: Harsh spaces inspired by raw concrete bunkers become harmonious, classical private places. An architecture report about Juliaan Lampens.