“What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.”

As quoted in "A Talk with Einstein" in The Listener 54 (1955) p. 123
Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and Religion (1999)

Source: Women (1978)
Context: I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn't fit the other. I didn't care.

Source: Killing Me Softly

Source: Funky Business Forever, 2007, p. 184
Context: Gallery visitors did not tell Picasso to invent cubism. Jazz fanatics did not suggest that should work with hip-hoppers. Moviegoers did not propose to Lars von Trier, the Danish film director, that he make Breaking the Waves. And customers sure as hell did not come up with the idea for CDNow or Amazon. com. If you want to do something really interesting and revolutionary, learn to ignore your customers.

Cassandra (1860)
Context: By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. It is the want of interest in our life which produces it; by filling up that want of interest in our life we can alone remedy it. And, did we even see this, how can we make the difference? How obtain the interest which society declares she does not want, and we cannot want?

Fightin Words (1999)

On the Silver Mark (1791)

As cited in: P. Adams Sitney Professor of Visual Arts Princeton University (2002) Visionary Film : The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000,