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...if you’re like me, and you lean on being rational rather than irrational, and you lean on being a good person rather than a full person, music can really help enchant you out of your own squareness.

-Mike Mills

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...a lot of why I stay off the internet and why we’ve done it the way we have mostly by word of mouth is that I believe that how you appreciate something is based largely, say 90%, in the context in which you experience it in and 10% on the actual content. So if you first hear music on a record, or you first hear about it because you go to a friend’s house, or you just see the cover in a record store and it speaks to you, that’s a great way to discover a song or an artist or to get into a journey. It’s a really beautiful and a little more poetic and a little more nuanced way than the other alternative which is that you see an ad in a magazine for it or you see it on the internet somewhere or read some article in some magazine about it.

Eric Isaacson, Mississippi Records

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Sontag

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Every writer of fiction wants to tell many stories, but we know that we can’t tell allthe stories — certainly not simultaneously. We know we must pick one story, well, one central story; we have to be selective. The art of the writer is to find as much as one can in that story, in that sequence … in that time (the timeline of the story), in that space (the concrete geography of the story). […] A novelist, then, is someone who takes you on a journey. Through space. Through time. A novelist leads the reader over a gap, makes something go where it was not. […] Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once … and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you. […] The work of the novelist is to enliven time, as it is to animate space.

Susan Sontag

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"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

Leonard Cohen

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(via The New Life | Lise Sarfati)

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"Children make up the best songs, anyway," he says. "Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don't care if they lose it; they'll just make another one." This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song "really wants to be written down, it'll stick in my head. If it wasn't interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else's song." "Some songs," he has learned, "don't want to be recorded." You can't wrestle with them or you'll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes "is trying to trap birds." Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like "digging potatoes out of the ground." Others are sticky and weird, like "gum found under an old table." Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful "to cut up as bait and use 'em to catch other songs." Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you "like dreams taken through a straw.' In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful. Like a clever kid with a new toy, Waits is always willing to play with a new song, to see what else it can become. He'll play with it forever in and out of the studio, in ways a real grown-up would never imagine. He'll pick it apart, turn it inside out, drag it backward through the mud, ride a bicycle over it- anything he can imagine to make it sound thicker, rougher, deeper, different. "I like my music," he says, "with the pulp and skin and seeds."

Tom Waits - Play It Like Your Hair's On Fire

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(via The Magic of Your First Car - The New York Times)

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I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live—if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.

Hayao Miyazaki

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Things to Come (L’Avenir) (2016) dir. Mia Hansen-Løve

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Summer Hours

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Summer Hours

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Summer Hours

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(via Like Flying Blind Without Instruments: On the Turning Point in Paris, Texas | Current | The Criterion Collection)