Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.

As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

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.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I’m going through or what’s going on in my life at that moment.

I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

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

I’m gonna go hard no matter what because I gotta feed my family, and I gotta feed myself.

It’s a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.

Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth… That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.

What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.

Genius, when young, is divine.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

A president either is constantly on top of events or, if he hesitates, events will soon be on top of him. I never felt that I could let up for a moment.

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

We are not punished for our sins, but by them.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind – like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

An individual step in character training is to put responsibility on the individual.

I call architecture frozen music.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

I think 9/11 affected everybody in one way or another.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

With Benghazi, I don’t see anyone saying, ‚Hey look, I am overall responsible for this and therefore, I take responsibility for what happened. It’s my fault.‘ I haven’t heard that yet. Meanwhile, the other side of the coin, the Osama bin Laden raid, it seems everyone made that decision, and that’s just unbelievable to me.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

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.

I think you have a moral responsibility when you’ve been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it’s different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He’s very quick.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.