Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

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.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

I might just write a novel next. I don’t know!

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

If a small-town boy like me who bagged groceries was able to make his dreams come true, you can too.

I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we’ve got a system that allows them to do it.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

In the future, you won’t buy artists‘ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of ‚their‘ works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

The future is called ‚perhaps‘, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.

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

Each book I’ve done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

You sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.

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

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

I believe in Coach Louis Wong. He is so much more than just a football coach.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Everybody thinks making films back to back is a big deal but they did it all the time in the old days.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn’t copy my style from anybody.

Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

I know the blessing of having a dad who played 16 years in the league. That experience, and seeing him as an example, let me know that it’s possible. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.