My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

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.

I can express myself.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

I performed in a bowling alley before while people were still bowling. Cut the check, and I will perform anywhere.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

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.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

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

I didn’t watch ‚The A-Team‘ movie. I’m an artist. You can’t re-paint a Rembrandt. You can’t duplicate that; I don’t care who you get.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

My clothes are very popular in Japan.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

I really wanted to be a model when I was little. I loved photography, and I loved being on camera. But I was short and chubby, so I couldn’t. Anyway, being an artist is way more interesting than just being a model because it’s about you and what you want to be. You’re not being treated like a clothes hanger.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

I try to do the fancy things out there by going with both hands, making crossover moves, and having a certain creativity and flair to my game.

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

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

In order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

I can get where some scientists would say comedians are crazy. What you have to understand: A lot of comedians are dealing with a dark passion. A lot of these are guys coming from a tumultuous life, including myself. Some people need outlets, a way to express yourself.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Labor gives birth to ideas.