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

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

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

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

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

Never regret what you don’t write.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

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

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.

O, had I but followed the arts!

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.

If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

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

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

I’m not interested in people positioning me next to other artists.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw – isn’t that wonderful – so I made up a false name.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

I never expected any sort of success with ‚Mockingbird’… I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

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.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.