All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

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.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

All good art is an indiscretion.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

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.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

I have so many designs and video ideas and lyrics in my head, so I always try to be productive.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

In art the best is good enough.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

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

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

The art is long, life is short.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

You fail only if you stop writing.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.

Art is the proper task of life.

I call architecture frozen music.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

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

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

It’s a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

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

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.