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

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

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.

All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Y’all are so cute and y’all talk so proper over here. I love England.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

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.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

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 wanted to write.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

A yawn is a silent shout.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

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.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

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

I feel Anglo-American.

If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

My focus is my art, and that’s what I love to do. I have to be really passionate in order to do something. I’ve turned down many things that I just didn’t believe in.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

In art the best is good enough.

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.