Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

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.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

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

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

I always like to create things that get attention. It used to be a problem when I wasn’t famous. Now, I can do whatever I want and people have to accept it.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

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

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.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

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.

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

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.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship – never.

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.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

There is spontaneity to my work.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

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.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

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.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

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