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

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

I never write about the road. I never write about hotels or anything like that.

I love to watch videos, and I’ve always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

All good art is an indiscretion.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

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.

Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

You make ‚em, I amuse ‚em.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

The concept of commercialism in the fashion and art world is looked down upon. You know, just to think, ‚What amount of creativity does it take to make something that masses of people like?‘ And, ‚How does creativity apply across the board?‘

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

I tend not to look back and dwell on a project once it is finished.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

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

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

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.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

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

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Every artist was first an amateur.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

It is a joy to be an artist, but it doesn’t mean very much unless that work is somehow useful in some way and contributes to others.

The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

College isn’t in everyone’s hearts. I am living proof, though, that school doesn’t mess up your plans. It gives you more experiences to write about.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.