All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

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

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

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

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

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

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

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

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

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.

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

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

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.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Never regret what you don’t write.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

I didn’t know the term ‚synesthesia‘ until I was working on ‚Cruel Summer.‘ Halfway into writing that, I really understood that, my entire life, I had been trying to describe this condition of mine: through painting, through this seven-screen Surround Vision film we shot in Qatar, through all these things.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

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.

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.

In art the best is good enough.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

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

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

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.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.