Bobby George

So we walked on beside the philosopher, ashamed, compassionate, dissatisfied with ourselves, and more than ever convinced that the old man was right and that we had done him wrong. How remote now seemed the youthful dream of our educational institution; how clearly we saw the danger which we had hitherto escaped merely by good luck, namely, giving ourselves up body and soul to the educational system which forced itself upon our notice so enticingly, for the time when we entered the public schools up to that moment. How then had it come about that we had not taken our places in the chorus of its admirers? Perhaps merely because we were real students, and could still draw back from the rough-and-tumble, the pushing and struggling, the restless, ever-breaking waves of publicity, to seek refuge in our own little educational establishment; which, however, time would have soon swallowed up also.

To pierce the mystery of the deep, it is sometimes necessary to regard the heights. It is earth’s hidden fire which appears at the summit of the volcano.

We sometimes proceed in a spiritual direction that is contrary to our talents; for a time, we struggle heroically against the tide and the wind, basically against ourselves: we become tired; whatever we accomplish brings no real joy. Indeed, we despair about our fertility, our future, perhaps in the midst of victory. Finally, finally, we turn around - and now the wind blows in our sail and drives us into our channel. What happiness! How certain of victory we feel! Now, for the first time, we know what we are and what we want; now we swear fidelity to ourselves and are permitted to do so - as those who know.

To the truly cultured man is vouchsafed the inestimable benefit of being able to remain faithful, without a break, to the contemplative instincts of childhood.

What moves me is the irregular form - the flawed words and stubborn sounds...that affect us whenever we try and say something that is important to us.

The graffiti movement has no other intention that to speak via pictures. Words for the community; words of love, words of hatred, of life and death. It's just a fine and subtle kind of therapy and an attempt to fill the emptiness of this terrible world, to cover public space with pictures that people going to work can enjoy.

Deleuze: "Félix has always possessed multiple dimensions; he participates in many different activities, both psychiatric and political; he does a lot of group work. He is an ‘intersection’ of groups, like a star. Or perhaps I should compare him to the sea: he always seems to be in motion, sparkling with light. He can jump from one activity to another. He doesn’t sleep much, he travels, he never stops. He never ceases. He has extraordinary speeds. I am more like a hill: I don’t move much, I can’t manage two projects at once, I obsess over my ideas, and the few movements I do have are internal. I like to write alone, and I don’t talk much, except during my seminars, when talking serves another purpose. Together, Félix and I would have made a good Sumo wrestler.

There’s this thing in technology, almost a disease, where the definition of success is making the most. How many clicks did you get, how many active users do you have, how many units did you sell? Everybody in technology seems to want big numbers. Steve never got carried away with that. He focused on making the best.

…at least in childhood, that if we imagine that a thing is so, it therefore either is so or can be made two become so. All of us have to learn that this almost never happens, or happens only in very limited ways; but the visionary, like the child, continues to believe that it always ought to happen.

Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,” he said. He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.”

That’s easy to talk about, but difficult without either sounding precious or glib—because there is no creative process. I mean, I sit down and write. That is really what happens. I sit down in the morning on Wednesday and I write. And sometimes it doesn’t work and almost always it does work, and that’s it. Like everybody else, I sometimes have a problem starting, but it passes quickly. I sometimes get stuck and then I just abandon it. I don’t try. I’m not somebody who works hard at writing. I wouldn’t know how to do that. I wouldn’t know what to do, if you see what I mean. I just write until it runs out, and then I start again when I can do it again, but I do like to be able to do it regularly, simply because I love the experience of doing it.

I never recovered from my education, I’ve just carried on with it. If you happen to like reading, it can have a very powerful effect on you, an evocative effect, at least on me. It’s not as though when I read I’m gathering information, or indeed can remember much of what I read. I know the books that grip me, as everybody does, but their effect is indiscernible. I don’t quite know what it is. The Leavisite position, more or less, is that reading certain sentences makes you more alive and a morally better person, and that those two things go together. It seems to me that that isn’t necessarily so, but what is clear is that there are powerful unconscious evocative effects in reading books that one loves. There’s something about these books that we want to go on thinking about, that matters to us. They’re not just fetishes that we use to fill gaps. They are like recurring dreams we can’t help thinking about.

There are no such proofs possible for the assertion that the art accepted by a public is fraudulent; the artist himself may not know.

Steve Jobs believed you had to control every brush stroke from beginning to end. Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection.

Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now moulded from complicated mixtures; the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch.