And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

I’ve got my Grammys on top of my piano and I look at them when I play.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Bhai was my hero and he had immense influence on me.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.

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.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

I like to work with artists from around the world. There are so many new inspiring filmmakers.

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.

A lot of my heartbreak songs are inspired by things my sisters are going through, or friends.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

It was 1996 and I was at a crossroads in my career. I had been working in Hollywood as a writer and was very unhappy. I had pitched an idea for a book some six months earlier, and the book packager, Joost Elffers, wanted me to write up a treatment for it.

Not having hope is not an excuse for not doing something.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

Never, and I mean never, allow anyone else’s ideas of who you can or can’t become sully your dream or pollute your imagination. This is your territory, and a ‚Keep Out‘ sign is a great thing to erect at all entrances to your imagination.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn’t entirely conquer – he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

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.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

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

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

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

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

I think a number of the leaders are, whether you like it or not, in the hip-hop generation. And when they understand enough, they’ll do wonders. I count on them.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

I do have motivation. A lot of motivation.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.