Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

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.

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

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I don’t let my religious world get too complicated.

When the solution is simple, God is answering.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

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

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.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

Life is short, the art long.

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 don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

I call architecture frozen music.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

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

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

Art is the proper task of life.

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.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

When I am putting looks together, I dare myself to make something work. I always look for the most interesting silhouette or something that’s a little off, but I have to figure it out. I have to make it me. I think that’s the thrill in fashion.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

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 resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

There is spontaneity to my work.

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.

If you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful – that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience – every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

Being an artist doesn’t just mean you have a song. That doesn’t make you an artist. The word ‚artist‘ means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists – Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West – are doing the most.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

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

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

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.