I never look at my watch when I’m sketching!

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

It’s time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

If I could, I would not do anything else. I’d just be in the studio for my whole life. I would never go to parties, events, and red carpets. I would rather just be in the studio for the whole time. I don’t even care. Nobody has to know what I look like. I just want to make music.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

It was a favorite expression of Theophrastus that time was the most valuable thing that a man could spend.

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.

I am in the fighting game. I don’t care about anything else. I don’t watch the news, I don’t care about politics, I don’t care about other sports. I don’t care about anything I don’t need to care about. This is my sport: it is my life. I study it; I think about it all the time. Nothing else matters.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

It’s tough to go to sleep at night, and I wake up after five hours because I feel like I’m wasting time. I just sit up at night and think about what I can do next.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

The art is long, life is short.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

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.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

‚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.‘

I’ve been on a calendar, but I’ve never been on time.

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

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

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

I got a signed document from Bullock’s saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course, nobody bought any of them, but otherwise, I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock’s!

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

Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.

I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

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

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

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

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

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

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.

Tomorrow, every Fault is to be amended; but that Tomorrow never comes.

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

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it… Success is shy – it won’t come out while you’re watching.

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.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.