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.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

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.

I call architecture frozen music.

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

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

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.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

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.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I don’t think a song should be put in a category.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

I’m an inventor.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

The reason I became 297 pounds is because that was comfortable. What was very uncomfortable was running. What was very uncomfortable was being on a diet. What was very uncomfortable was trying to face things that I didn’t want to face. And I also realized, when I was really big, I had no growth. Why? Because I was living comfortable.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

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.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

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

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

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

I’m still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

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.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

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.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.