One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

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

Talking isn’t doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

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

I don’t understand why or how we can bully each other.

I create stars.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

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

What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way. My view is, first you get them to laugh, then you get them to listen.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

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.

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.

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.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly.

The good thing about having chemistry is, when you get to the improv section of a scene, you’ve got somebody to feed off. It can go on and on and on, and the sky’s the limit.

Before I speak, I have something important to say.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Stage actors are usually much more conscious of speaking up and making sure that everyone can hear in the back of the theatre; a film actor probably thinks of that a little less.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

To be social is to be forgiving.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

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 not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

When you really don’t like a guy, they’re all over you, and as soon as you act like you like them, they’re no longer interested.

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.

You can stroke people with words.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

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

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

Counsel with your parents is a privilege at any age.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

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.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

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

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can’t make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

Swearing is industry language. For as long as we’re alive it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

I like to speak on matters which matter to human beings, and almost everything matters to human beings.

In art the best is good enough.

When I’m nervous, I stutter, and I had to keep stopping and starting.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn’t been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that’s really worthwhile.

The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam – those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that’s legitimate.

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.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

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.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.