Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don’t usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

It’s good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that’s better than you’d imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

I say this everywhere I go: I admire and respect Hillary. She has been a lawyer, a law professor, First Lady of Arkansas, First Lady of the United States, a U.S. Senator, Secretary of State.

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

Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

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.

When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.

I admire people who destroy themselves.

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

I’m very good at what I do, and I don’t turn my hand to something unless I’m very good at it, frankly.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

Writing a song is so personal. You have to have trust in someone you’re working with; otherwise, you’re not gonna come out with something that’s really you.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

I call architecture frozen music.

‚Recreative‘ is a word that I invented because in urban culture, with colloquialism, we invent so many slangs. I don’t like the way that ‚recreational‘ sounds – I don’t like to say I do a lot of ‚recreational‘ reading. I like to say that I read ‚recreatively.‘ I do a lot of ‚recreative‘ reading.

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.

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.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I’m very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I’m feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It’s gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

Like so many American families, our families weren’t asking for much. They didn’t begrudge anyone else’s success or care that others had much more than they did… in fact, they admired it.

I went through all the musicians in my life who I admire as bright, intelligent, virtuosic players.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

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

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

ESPN is a great organization to work for.

In the successful organization, no detail is too small to escape close attention.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

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

You know, I’m just 6’9 and 260. And just so happen to be very good at playing the game of basketball.“

If I am a cup maker, I’m interested in making the best cup I possibly can. My effort goes into that cup, not what people think about it.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

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.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.