Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

I like being a writer.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

If I weren’t performing, I’d be a beauty editor or a therapist. I love creativity, but I also love to help others. My mother was a hairstylist, and they listen to everyone’s problems – like a beauty therapist!

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

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

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Desire of having is the sin of covetousness.

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

All art is quite useless.

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 real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

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.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I’m very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I’m feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It’s gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

Life is warfare.

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.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

I don’t have to see a murder in order to condemn murder.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

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.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.