Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

America is the greatest country in the world.

I enjoyed working with Stephen Merchant. He was wonderful. I’ve been such a big fan of his acting.

The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.

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 just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

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.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

Everything I’ve been thinking, every vision, even down to every shot I throw, it just ends up here in reality. Whether it was in a fight and how to react or whether it was in a stadium with screaming fans or whether I was in a fancy car or the best clothes ever, I always put myself somewhere.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

I think that growing up in a crowded continent like Europe with an awful lot of competing claims, ideas… cultures… and systems of thought, we have, perforce, developed a more sophisticated notion of what the word ‚freedom‘ means than I see much evidence of in America.

There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.

The men who followed Him were unique in their generation. They turned the world upside down because their hearts had been turned right side up. The world has never been the same.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.

I wanted to write.

My home is in Heaven. I’m just traveling through this world.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

You fail only if you stop writing.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

Never, and I mean never, allow anyone else’s ideas of who you can or can’t become sully your dream or pollute your imagination. This is your territory, and a ‚Keep Out‘ sign is a great thing to erect at all entrances to your imagination.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows.

Technology is huge; I wanted to learn about it. People might say that’s odd, but I think it’s odd if artists aren’t interested in the world around them. I’m always chasing that.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

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

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.

It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

I believe in being an innovator.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

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.

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

Actors are one family over the entire world.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

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.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Responsibility is the price of freedom.

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