Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you’ve got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it’s a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

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.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things – and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

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

The whole aspect of cinema and film festivals should be a moment to come together and celebrate art and humanity. It would be a shame if there was such a divide.

I like to choreograph and create and design the costumes and do it all and then step back and watch it and then move on to the next project.

You can stroke people with words.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

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 the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

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

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

Coffee is a language in itself.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Many people in the western world are spoiled by the conveniences of our culture.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

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.

Good ideas are free – or at least they should be.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

On the whole, we think of our consumers – other judges, lawyers, the public. The law that the Supreme Court establishes is the law that they must live by, so all things considered, it’s better to have it clearer than confusing.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

I didn’t know the term ‚synesthesia‘ until I was working on ‚Cruel Summer.‘ Halfway into writing that, I really understood that, my entire life, I had been trying to describe this condition of mine: through painting, through this seven-screen Surround Vision film we shot in Qatar, through all these things.