An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

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

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

I have my permanent muses and my muses of the moment.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

I wanted to get a job being creative, and I did.

I made all my generals out of mud.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

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

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

All art is but imitation of nature.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

I like being a writer.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

It doesn’t matter where you come from, what you have or don’t have, what you lack, or what you have too much of. But all you need to have is faith in God, an undying passion for what you do and what you choose to do in this life, and a relentless drive and the will to do whatever it takes to be successful in whatever you put your mind to.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

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.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

There’s not much time to unwind, but you know what, it’s because I love what I do. I look forward to the season. I look forward to playing games. It doesn’t ever feel like work.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family. I love what I do, but it’s not where it begins and ends.

I am the freest author in the world.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever – was write novels.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

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

All art is quite useless.

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.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

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

I love making movies, but there’s nothing like performing live.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‚the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.‘ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‚Artist.‘

Originality is really important.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

Alternative R&B is in my soul. It’s not going anywhere.

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, ‚One tear, right now,‘ that one tear would pop out.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.