One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

All art is dependent on technology because it’s a human endeavour, so even when you’re using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that’s technology.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.

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

It’s not to much fun to know yourself too well or think you do – everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through & past the falls.

Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

Fear is exciting for me.

It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

All art is quite useless.

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

And I love a scary movie. It makes your toes curl and it’s not you going through it.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

I want more of my favorite artists or more of the guy that makes the anthems. I want more.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

There’s nowhere else like London. Nothing at all, anywhere.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.