I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

In business or in life, don’t follow the wagon tracks too closely.

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of ‚Hitchhiker’s,‘ and I thought, ‚No, no.‘ I didn’t want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Whatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

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

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

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

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 was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

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

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

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

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I’m proud of.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

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.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

Imagination rules the world.

I think I belong to America’s last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

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

Lena Waithe won an Emmy for writing while starring on the Netflix show ‚Master of None,‘ but it might be more accurate to call her a Master of Everything.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

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

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.