A Quote by Van Morrison
[Jean-Paul] Sartre was a throwback to the existential period. I'm not really so much into that these days. I went through a period of going over things and looking at them again to see what they were. But I'm into psychiatry type things. I'm into philosophy. I'm into that sort of thing.
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This is the personal side of things. When I started going through some of those transitions in my mind, just as a human being versus as an artist, I tried to... Essentially, I did this thing called Landmark Forum. It's three days of mind-expanding, existential philosophy, like Jean-Paul Sartre for everyday living. In existential philosophy they talk about "Being and Nothingness," this idea of not putting meaning onto things, and that in that way you live more purely. In other words, we form reality from these stories that we make up about our lives.
I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
I'm looking back to a period of my life when I was badly hurt and then looking at another time when I felt I had things going for me again, so I suppose there is a theme [of the Faith album].
I've taken people and fired them over a period of a year. I've fired them over a period of a month. I've fired them over a period of a day or a week, nice and easy, slow. The one thing that a firing always has in common is the next day they wake up and they hate Donald Trump, no matter how nice you are.
Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that period carefully now thinks different things on different days.
When I was 17, I was at La Coupole brasserie, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir asked me to join them at their table. They were fascinated that I'd watched their programme on existentialism back home and wanted to understand nothingness and being.
I know I'm guilty of and I think a lot of people are guilty of sort of getting starry-eyed with love and sort of looking over the bad things and keep going and you don't really prepare for how much work marriage really is.
When we make progress quickly, it feeds our emotions. Then, when there's a period of waiting or we hit a plateau, we find out how committed we really are and whether we're going to see things through to the finish or quit.
I can't honestly say where the inspiration for my work came from. I think it came from reading. It came from texts, from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, it came from, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre. These are the ideas that got me worked up and inspired. It wasn't so much the visual things that inspired me. Although, of course, there were plenty of painters in history that I admired all the way from Brueghel to Goya, to Picasso - because everything visual stimulates me.
Everyone has so much hope for a better humanity, and many, including [Jean Paul] Sartre, turned to the idea of communism in its beginnings. Generosity had a place in people's hopes.
We knew of Sartre and we dressed like the French existentialists. Our philosophy then, and remember we were only little kids, was more in following their looks than their thoughts. We were going around looking moody.
We all have a short period of time on this earth-We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we're going to be here nor do I, but my feeling is I've got to accomplish a lot of these things while I'm young.
So I’m thinking this is the part of my movie where things appear as if nothing is going to work out. I have to remind myself that all movie characters go through this sort of dark period before they find their happy ending.
Jean-Paul Sartre said that France was freer than ever during the German occupation, when people had no choices but one: to collaborate or to resist. I'm not saying there was something good about that system. But the freest people I've ever met, or knew about, belonged to that period. For example, Musine Kokalari, an Albanian writer who dared to fight for political pluralism and free elections. She created the first social democratic party, despite knowing the high price she would have to pay.
People tend to set themselves up in patterns; something happens, it hurts them, then something similar happens, and - it's happened again! It seems much bigger then, and they get worried and go through life looking for that thing, and because they're so concerned and looking for it, when anything that happens resembles that thing, they're sure it's happening again. So sometimes people think things are repeating even when they're not.
When you start in the childhood period, when you begin to form a comic sense, it was the radio comedians - from the last days of radio and the first days of television. And Spike Jones. And the Marx Brothers. They represented anarchy. They took things that were nice and decent and proper, and they tore them to shreds. That attracted me.
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