I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

I always hated how I looked on camera. I never put a face to my music, which actually made the music that much more mysterious.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he’s up there with Bryan Ferry.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

I grew up in a musical family; the majority of my growing up was done in Hawaii. It’s what we do. You sing, you dance, you play ukulele and you drink.

I always say, you gotta play a dive bar like you play an arena, and you play an arena like you play a dive bar.

I was always singing but didn’t plan on pursuing it seriously. When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn – I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point – and that was it.

I love movement. I love moshing.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

Because you have things like ‚American Idol‘ and you’ve got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it’s easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn’t exist without the performance-art element.

The music we do is for people to enjoy, dance and sing to it. Dreamers – keep on dreaming and keep working hard to achieve your goals. There are many difficulties, but what matters is to stay focused and have perseverance.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

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.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

I really appreciate the moments that I was able to win rap album of the year or whatever.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Music is really driving my whole life.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

One of my most popular songs, ‚Satellites,‘ I paid $300 for that beat on SoundClick.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

If I was just a fan of music, I would think that I was the number one artist in the world.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

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

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

I sing and play the guitar, and I’m a walking, talking bacterial infection.

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.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

That’s why I hate to get started in these jam sessions. I’m always the last one to leave.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging – weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn’t want to do. I’m very grateful to him, actually.

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

I feel connected to my generation through the music, but I also fear for us. We’re in a very self-destructive state where we’re addicted to outside opinions and we all feel like we have fans.