Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

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.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

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.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

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

Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

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

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don’t censor yourself, you end up with what you’re most concerned about, but you haven’t filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

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.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

When I am putting looks together, I dare myself to make something work. I always look for the most interesting silhouette or something that’s a little off, but I have to figure it out. I have to make it me. I think that’s the thrill in fashion.

Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

The Middle East is hopeful. There’s hope there.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

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

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

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

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.

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.

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

There is spontaneity to my work.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

When fate hands you a lemon, make lemonade.

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.

Imagination rules the world.

I like being a writer.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘