An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.

To be clear: we have fights and problems like any other couple.

I am not one who – who flamboyantly believes in throwing a lot of words around.

Never ask anyone over 70 how they feel. They’ll tell you.

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.

People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

When I look at public opinion, I’m not far out of the mainstream. I’m in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I’ve ever said.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

I think country music is popular – has been popular and will always be popular because I think a lot of real people singing about a lot of real stuff about real people. And it’s simple enough for people to understand it. And we kind of roll with the punches.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people’s faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.

My mother encouraged me to be artistic. It was written in a contract at an early age that I would be an artist.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

‚Good English‘ is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.

The second time around, I’ll understand that, as a husband, my wife doesn’t care about my opinions. I just need to tell her the things that will continue to help me stack the brownie points.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

You might be the funniest guy in the world, but if you don’t have anything to talk about, people are eventually going to gravitate towards the guy that’s actually saying something.

But I’m pretty good with collaborative thinking. I work well with other people.

I describe myself as a simple Buddhist monk. No more, no less.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

I’ve gotten used to being Frank Ocean.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

It is very hard to not be able to engage with people in a real and honest way because they either want something from me, or they see me as something that I simply am not.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

I’m giving all that I have in this life. I’m opening up my notebook, and I’m saying everything in there out loud.

If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.

What women need to understand is that men don’t communicate. It’s not intentional or on purpose. We’re just not as emotional. You ladies feel like you have to express yourselves.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.

I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.

I’ll never make it, it will never happen, because they’re never going to hear me ‚cause they’re screaming all the time.

Simplicity is a key to avoiding complication. Part of the definition of simplicity is ‚not complex or complicated; sincere.‘

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

I’m not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We’re not ‚celebrities‘, whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They’re what people meet.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

I get impatient with people working on a film that have their head in their hands like it’s the most complicated thing in the world.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

I’m turned on by guys who are cultured. That’ll keep me intrigued. They don’t have to have a single degree, but they should speak other languages or know things about other parts of the world or history or certain artists or musicians. I like to be taught. I like to sit on that side of the table.

I’m the most boring person to talk to.

Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.