Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Bhai was my hero and he had immense influence on me.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

Who’s my hero? That’s a great question… Well, I think my dad is my hero, because he’s someone I look up to every day.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend. Non-being is the greatest joy.

‚The New Yorker‘ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.

Hope is the magic carpet that transports us from the present moment into the realm of infinite possibilities.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

I try to use my experience and the fact that I grew up in the ghetto – I tell people you don’t have to rob or steal to get out of the ghetto.

Boys do cry, but I don’t think I shed a tear for a good chunk of my teenage years.

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.

I find a lot of inspiration through visuals. When I was 12, I saw Aurora’s ‚Runaway‘ music video. Something inside me clicked, like, ‚That is what I want to do, no matter whether it goes anywhere or not.‘

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

In 1995, I was diagnosed with cancer, and I had to practice what I preached. I had always said to ‚believe in God‘ and ‚don’t give up‘ to little kids who had been diagnosed with cancer. I then thought if I can’t call on that same God and same strength that I told people about, I would be a liar and a phony.

The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We’re inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, ‚Gimme, gimme, gimme,‘ you will always be in short supply.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

Fear is real, but so is love.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Sometimes I think my husband is so amazing that I don’t know why he’s with me. I don’t know whether I’m good enough. But if I make him happy, then I’m everything I want to be.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

I got a greater purpose. God put something in my heart to get across, and that’s what I’m going to focus on, using my voice as an instrument and doing what needs to be done.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‚yours,‘ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

All of my writing is God-given.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I’m talking about myself very directly.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.

Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with. In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are.