I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

For my career, I wouldn’t go racing if I didn’t enjoy it. I still need to have my say, and not just get put with a team and get told to deal with it.

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

I tried acting, liked it, and stuck with it. I saw it as the way I would keep that promise to myself of getting back at those who had made my school life a misery.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

I would always want printed books.

I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand – good heavens! – that’s what I really call troublesome.

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

The law is reason, free from passion.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

‚Nation‘ was one that I’d have killed myself if I hadn’t written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.

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

Being an artist doesn’t just mean you have a song. That doesn’t make you an artist. The word ‚artist‘ means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists – Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West – are doing the most.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

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

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

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

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean?

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

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

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

I don’t read ‚chick lit,‘ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.

I don’t race cars.

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can’t make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

I am not a consecutive writer.

On ‚Grey’s Anatomy‘ I wouldn’t care what I was playing – I would play a corpse, ‚cause I love it that much. It is deep true love, and it will never die.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

You can stroke people with words.

When I got somethin‘ to say, I’ll say it.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

I never look at my watch when I’m sketching!

As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don’t get that.

I just want to be myself.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

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.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

I was always interested – I mean, it’s kind of part of your job – I was always interested in the camera.

Music comes to me more readily than words.