I always want to create and do things, or draw.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

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.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

There has to be something in every role that interests you.

Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

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.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

Genius, when young, is divine.

I’ve been writing my entire life, and I’ll always write.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

Those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

I like talking. I like acting.

Think off-center.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

Oh yes, I love to do shoes. I’m not a fetishist but I love to do shoes.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

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

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

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.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

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’ve made money, and I’ve been ripped off. I’ve had creative freedom, and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will.