Art is the proper task of life.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

No man was ever wise by chance.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

I thought one should have the attitude of ‚What do you care what other people think!‘

Being a hybrid maker off and on over the years, I’m very comfortable with the idea and have been the subject of quite a few pretty good mash-ups myself.

Life is better when people are working, happy, and spending money.

Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

I want to look my best for God. So many people have the attitude that if you’re a Christian you’ve got to dress bad, wear an old color, not do anything to your hair, have nothing. It’s no wonder that Christianity is not very attractive. I mean, how many people do you know in a Western culture that’s going to go, ‚Yeah, give me some of that?‘

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

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

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I know the blessing of having a dad who played 16 years in the league. That experience, and seeing him as an example, let me know that it’s possible. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

Health is the soul that animates all the enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless without it.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

Wine gives a man nothing… it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society.

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

What we live by we die by.

When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish – people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people – and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

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

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

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.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail. Reasons the card, but passion the gale.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I’m going through or what’s going on in my life at that moment.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

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

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

I have been very interested and intrigued and congratulatory toward President Bush and his paintings.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

I write all of my own speeches.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

We were born to die and we die to live. As seedlings of God, we barely blossom on earth; we fully flower in heaven.