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.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

Well, in order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times.

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.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.

Metal, I love metal sounds. If I have a stick with me, I just drag it across a fence. And all fences make different sounds, just like people when they laugh.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

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

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

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.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

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.

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they’re not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don’t care about money, and that’s not my problem.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

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

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

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.

If I was just a fan of music, I would think that I was the number one artist in the world.

I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity, and that includes all kinds of parts.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

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.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.