And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

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.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

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.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

I don’t do research. I never have.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

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.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

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.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

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.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

I usually don’t like to ‚spoon feed‘ my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

The good thing about having chemistry is, when you get to the improv section of a scene, you’ve got somebody to feed off. It can go on and on and on, and the sky’s the limit.

In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

It was 1996 and I was at a crossroads in my career. I had been working in Hollywood as a writer and was very unhappy. I had pitched an idea for a book some six months earlier, and the book packager, Joost Elffers, wanted me to write up a treatment for it.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

I never write about the road. I never write about hotels or anything like that.