A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

Some day, following the example of the United States of America, there will be a United States of Europe.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

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.

Whenever something went wrong when I was young – if I had a pimple or if my hair broke – my mom would say, ‚Sister mine, I’m going to make you some soup.‘ And I really thought the soup would make my pimple go away or my hair stronger.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

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.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

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.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

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

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

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

Never regret what you don’t write.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

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.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

I just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes’s or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?

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.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

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.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

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

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

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 think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

The only difference between Benito and Bad Bunny is 16 million followers on Instagram. And the money that Bad Bunny has in the bank. Benito had, like, $7. The numbers are different, but I’m still the same. Even my insecurities remain the same.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man’s, I mean.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

I don’t think a song should be put in a category.

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.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

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

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

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.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.