Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

A letter does not blush.

I think you can give a pure artistic product if you understand how to build your own industry.

No one ever doubts that I mean what I say. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.

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

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

I do not pilfer victory.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

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.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‚light‘ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

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.

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

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.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest – ask him. If he says, ‚Yes,‘ you know he is a crook.

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

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

Young people can create beautiful things.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

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

The human race is governed by its imagination.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

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’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

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

It’s time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

I say what I want to say and do what I want to do. There’s no in between. People will either love you for it or hate you for it.