All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

I think you can give a pure artistic product if you understand how to build your own industry.

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

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.

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

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.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

However, there’s no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

I’m not really concerned with portraying this tough warrior – I mean, that’s part of my job and I take that very seriously. But I don’t have anything to hide, and I’m not concerned with what people think.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

Nobody likes to have trouble. The moment we get a hint that it’s coming, a common response is, ‚Oh no! Not again!‘

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

I have the space and liberty to create.

If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

I’m working on bringing the instant film camera back as part of the future.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

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 am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

I always like to create things that get attention. It used to be a problem when I wasn’t famous. Now, I can do whatever I want and people have to accept it.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.