Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be like: ‚Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.‘

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

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

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

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

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

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

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?

You can stroke people with words.

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

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

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.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

With fools, there is no companionship. Rather than to live with men who are selfish, vain, quarrelsome, and obstinate, let a man walk alone.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

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

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

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

Imagination decides everything.

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

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

But if I have a lot of imagination, I could tell myself whatever I wanted, you know. I handle myself quite well. I’m kind of fascist with myself, you know. There’s no discussion. There is an order. You follow it.