Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

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

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

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.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

Rastafari not a culture, it’s a reality.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

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

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

The intensity of the football and how the people live football in Liverpool – it is not a usual.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China’s Communists.

The mainstream is always under attack.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife.

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

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

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

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

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‚Don’t try.‘ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

Whatever is on the page is what I’m married to. I’m very prepared. I’m a thespian. I don’t like to improv. I don’t like to go off course ‚cause I think that’s where stuff happens. When you stick to the material ‚cause it’s written so well, that’s where the magic happens.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

I don’t have stylistic loyalty. That’s why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

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

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.

I’ve had mixtapes that have been better than albums I’ve heard from other artists. I take my time; I put my heart into it.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

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

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

My imagination is a twisted place.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.