It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

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

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

The good thing about having chemistry is, when you get to the improv section of a scene, you’ve got somebody to feed off. It can go on and on and on, and the sky’s the limit.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

There are two bowlers who I think are very tough to play against – Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel.

I’m not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose… it’ll be much harder to detect.

Genius, when young, is divine.

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

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

I’m the first to admit this whole salary thing is getting out of control. In the final analysis, it’s still about the work.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

It’s not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

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

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

I believe in being an innovator.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

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

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

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

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

No great thing is created suddenly.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

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

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.