As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

I am the freest author in the world.

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

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

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.

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

I create stars.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‚Don’t try.‘ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

In the future, you won’t buy artists‘ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of ‚their‘ works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

I didn’t really want to live, so anything that was an investment in time made me angry… but also I just felt sad. When the hopelessness is hurting you, it’s the fixtures and fittings that finish you off.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, ‚One tear, right now,‘ that one tear would pop out.

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.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

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.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

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

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

I just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

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

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

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

The last people with any ideas are young people.

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.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Before 1915, space and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place, but which was not affected by what happened in it. Space and time are now dynamic quantities… space and time not only affect but are also affected by everything that happens in the universe.

Every artist was first an amateur.