A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

I’m not interested in people positioning me next to other artists.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.

Every story has its demands.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

The thing is, ‚Discworld‘ had been going on for a very long time, and I’ve written children’s books as well. Usually when people have a really big series they franchise it, which I thought is a bit of a no-no, so I thought what I’d do is I’d franchise it to myself.

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.

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

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

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I’m very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I’m feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It’s gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

The most genius thing about the way I create is to create with other geniuses.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

I love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

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.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

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.

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

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

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

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

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.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

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.