For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

My entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life, a commitment to do something for the poor.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

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.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

God has equipped you to handle difficult things. In fact, He has already planted the seeds of discipline and self-control inside you. You just have to water those seeds with His Word to make them grow!

My dad used to have an expression – ‚It is the lucky person who gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they are about to do, and thinks it still matters.‘

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

People want to feel hopeful.

I just make the pictures and where they fall is where they fall. If somebody likes them, that’s always nice. And if they don’t like them, then too bad.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don’t censor yourself, you end up with what you’re most concerned about, but you haven’t filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be like: ‚Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.‘

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

If a small-town boy like me who bagged groceries was able to make his dreams come true, you can too.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.

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

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

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.

There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Every day, the people I meet inspire me… every day, they make me proud… every day they remind me how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on earth.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

I’ve got my Grammys on top of my piano and I look at them when I play.

When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

If you can ask a young man to give his life for his country, you can lead people.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.