Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

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

Metal, I love metal sounds. If I have a stick with me, I just drag it across a fence. And all fences make different sounds, just like people when they laugh.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

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

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

I love to watch videos, and I’ve always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

I’ve got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I’ve done it.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

There is nothing so stable as change.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

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.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

I think what it really is, is that I date creative people. And I think that what intimidates them is not my purse; it’s my mind.

I have so many designs and video ideas and lyrics in my head, so I always try to be productive.

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

Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

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

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

Who sows virtue reaps honor.

A lie cannot live.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

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.

‚Nation‘ was one that I’d have killed myself if I hadn’t written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

It’s good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that’s better than you’d imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

The people of Egypt are an intelligent people with a glorious history who left their mark on civilization.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

Be smarter than other people, just don’t tell them so.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

I made all my generals out of mud.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.