"If the reason why you're doing anything creative is to make a living, then you're doing it wrong"

“My son's a painter. All through school his teachers tell him he's a genius. I tell him to paint me an apple that looks like an apple before he paints me one that doesn't. Go where you can go, but start from someplace recognizable.”

Source : Charles Mingus' statement in Mainliner Magazine (July 1977); later quoted in Olivia Bertagnolli "Creativity and the writing process" (p. 182), 1982.

“The main reason for healing is love.”

“The fog lifted in the evening and a blue-black band at the horizon marked the end of the sea and the beginning of thought. Where does a beginning begin when nothing has gone on before?”

“I'm always, all the time, eating chocolate. I eat pretty healthy, but then I go all out when it has to do with chocolate.”

“Goddammit. Yeah, I have. First, there's a huge difference between being arrested and being guilty. Second, see, the law changes and I don't. How I stand vis-à-vis the law at any given moment depends on the law. The law can change from state to state, from nation to nation, from city to city. I guess I have to go by a higher law. How's that? Yeah, I consider myself a road man for the lords of karma.”

“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.”

“When it comes to music, I'm definitely thinking [about] what I would like to hear.”

Source : "Toro Y Moi Talks New Album, Underneath the Pine". Interview with Larry Fitzmaurice, pitchfork.com. November 23, 2010.

“When I was released by the Americans I read historian Trevor Roper's book, 'The Last Days of Hitler'. Throughout the book like a red line, runs an eyewitness report by Hanna Reitsch about the final days in the bunker. I never said it. I never wrote it. I never signed it. It was something they invented. Hitler died with total dignity.”