It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

I think people should feel encouraged to be themselves.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

If you have passion, there is no need for excuses because your enthusiasm will trump any negative reasoning you might come up with. Enthusiasm makes excuses a nonissue.

A person who is truly authentic doesn’t need to play a role in life, we think, but can simply be him – or herself.

The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

I know that I always wanted things. I was always proud of my people, proud of my home, but I always wanted more. I think most people do.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

I can say I’d honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I’ve written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

I felt like, for so many years – and I still even feel it – as a girl, you can’t really expect to go on stage and dress like a boy and jump around and scream with the audience and mosh and stuff, and every time that happens, I feel really proud.

It doesn’t matter where you come from, what you have or don’t have, what you lack, or what you have too much of. But all you need to have is faith in God, an undying passion for what you do and what you choose to do in this life, and a relentless drive and the will to do whatever it takes to be successful in whatever you put your mind to.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

America is another name for opportunity.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure.

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. I don’t know how to do anything else.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

When you’re just like everybody else, you’ve nothing to offer other than your conformity.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

I don’t have stylistic loyalty. That’s why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

I want to be the greatest actor that ever lived, frankly. I’d love that. But I don’t need to be. I just want to be here. That’s it.

With all due respect, the Mona Lisa is overrated.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

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

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Dream and you shall become.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

You will never fulfill your destiny doing work you despise.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

It never mattered to me that people in school didn’t think that country music was cool, and they made fun of me for it – though it did matter to me that I was not wearing the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some point, I was just like, ‚I like wearing sundresses and cowboy boots.‘

Rap was my drug.

I can simply tell you that since I was a kid, I didn’t like to look like anyone else.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.