All art is quite useless.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

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.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Whatever is on the page is what I’m married to. I’m very prepared. I’m a thespian. I don’t like to improv. I don’t like to go off course ‚cause I think that’s where stuff happens. When you stick to the material ‚cause it’s written so well, that’s where the magic happens.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

In business or in life, don’t follow the wagon tracks too closely.

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

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.

Study men, not historians.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

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?

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

I don’t think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of the New York Times.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

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 don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

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.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin – find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

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

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

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.

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.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed – it is a process of elimination.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

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.

I’m big on what’s in good taste.

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

I have the ’77 Million Paintings‘ running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I’ll look up from what I’m doing and I think, ‚God, I’ve never seen anything like that before!‘ And that’s a real thrill.