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.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

I am attracted to people who make this effort in knowing what suits them – they are individual and stylish.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

I’m a spokesman for myself. It just so happens that there’s a bunch of people that are concerned with what I have to say. I find that frightening at times because I’m just as confused as most people. I don’t have the answers for anything.

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.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

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.

Let us all remember this: one cannot proclaim the Gospel of Jesus without the tangible witness of one’s life.

I go through a lot of depression, and I know other people do, too, but I have an outlet that so many people don’t. If you have that inside of you and can’t get it out, what do you do?

I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

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

Life would pall if it were all sugar; salt is bitter if taken by itself; but when tasted as part of the dish, it savours the meat. Difficulties are the salt of life.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

All art is quite useless.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can’t make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

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.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you’re gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It’s yours. Seize your space.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

Anything I’ve ever said, I certainly was feeling at the time.

I believe life is an intelligent thing: that things aren’t random.

‚The New Yorker‘ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

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.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

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

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says, ‚What kind of music do you make?‘, and you say, ‚Pop music.‘ You may as well have ‚I’m not cool‘ stamped on your forehead.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

I love dresses, and I’ve definitely thought about designing them someday. I just want to make sure that I wait until the time is perfect and I can do it right.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

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

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

My imagination is a twisted place.

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

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

All of my music is honest.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

I write all my sermons.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.