I always like to create things that get attention. It used to be a problem when I wasn’t famous. Now, I can do whatever I want and people have to accept it.

I believe in being an innovator.

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

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.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

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 like being a writer.

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.

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.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

Commodities such as gold and silver have a world market that transcends national borders, politics, religions, and race. A person may not like someone else’s religion, but he’ll accept his gold.

Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I don’t really focus on these things – on what tags are given to me or what people think of me off the field – stuff like that. My main focus is always to do well on the field for the Indian cricket team. When people say good things about me off the field, I am more than happy to accept them.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

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

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.

I wanted to write.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

I met my husband before I became a star, and he doesn’t care about any of it.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

I do know this: God does answer your prayers, but it’s not always in the way you expect. God knows what’s best for us, though, so there’s no need to worry when things don’t go how we originally wanted them to go.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

I have the space and liberty to create.

What I’ve learned is that you really don’t need to be a celebrity or have money or have the paparazzi following you around to be famous.

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

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

I was probably the first footballer ever to have a pop-star profile, and my agent was right when he said we could put my name on stair rods and sell them to people in bungalows.

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.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

People don’t realize that we, we meaning people in show business, have the same problems as everyone else. Money doesn’t change that. Fame doesn’t change that. Sometimes that brings on more problems. You know, it’s just a different kind of problems.

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.

I love diversity.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

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.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.