You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

The thing most people don’t pick up when they become an entrepreneur is that it never ends. It’s 24/7.

I create stars.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

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

There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men: time.

In the future, you won’t buy artists‘ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of ‚their‘ works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.

As I read more and more – and it was not all verse, by any means – my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

It’s probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

I can write a song in about an hour if it’s a simple country song.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

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

I just don’t have time to get old!

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

I’m a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there’s very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in ‚I Shall Wear Midnight,‘ which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they’re practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don’t fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

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

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.

I intend to inspire people with my story: motivate young people that grew up like myself, or even not like myself. Just, you know, go through the human experience.

I’d have to be superman to do some of the things I’m supposed to have done, I’ve been at six different places at six different times.

Your greatest asset is your earning ability. Your greatest resource is your time.

Young people can create beautiful things.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

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.

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.

Every artist was first an amateur.

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

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

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

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

Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.