You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

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.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

When I wake up, I expect things to be good. If they’re not, then I try to set about trying to make them as good as I can ‚cause I know I’m gonna have to live that day anyway. So why not try to make the most of it if you can? Some days, they pan out a little better than others, but you still gotta always just try.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

I just make the pictures and where they fall is where they fall. If somebody likes them, that’s always nice. And if they don’t like them, then too bad.

To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.

Think and grow rich.

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?

If you’ve lost your spirit, even living in the richest country in the world can’t help you become rich.

I’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

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.

Do not let circumstances control you. You change your circumstances.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

Quitting doesn’t enter my mind.

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

I think when people make a record with a goal in mind – like taking it to the next level or making them seem more mature – that gets in the way of writing great songs.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don’t believe too much into inspiration, only I’m waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It’s a little too easy to say that.

People always say that you can’t please everybody. I think that’s a cop-out. Why not attempt it? ‚Cause think of all the people you will please if you try.

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

A warrior is not a person that carries a gun. The biggest war you ever go through is right between your own ears. It’s in your mind. We’re all going through a war in our mind, and we have to callus our mind to fight that war and to win that war.

Every artist was first an amateur.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

The mind is everything. What you think you become.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

Fear clogs; faith liberates.

I believe that when you think of the negative, and you get up discouraged – ‚There’s nothing good in my future‘ – I really believe it almost ties the hands of God. God works where there’s an attitude of faith. I believe faith is all about hope.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

The battle is all over except the ‚shouting‘ when one knows what is wanted and has made up his mind to get it, whatever the price may be.

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Hope is favorable and confident expectation; it’s an expectant attitude that something good is going to happen and things will work out, no matter what situation we’re facing.

People’s minds are changed through observation and not through argument.

All art is quite useless.

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.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.