The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

It’s very difficult for the American people to believe that our government, one of the richest on Earth, is also one of the stingiest on Earth.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can’t do anything with that except do it.

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

The artist in me cries out for design.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

I believe in being an innovator.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

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.

If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

Some men do think I’m a psycho bunny-boiler.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I’m proud of.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

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

The human race is governed by its imagination.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

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.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

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.