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

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

Man lives for science as well as bread.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

Not bragging by any means, but I could have done a lot of other stuff as far as working in films go and working in television… I had chances to do that stuff, but I like baseball, I really do.

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!

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

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

Music is something no one can control.

Genius, when young, is divine.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn’t care what kind of movies I made.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt – you know, I had to go out and do them.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‚Don’t try.‘ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

When I look at acting careers that I really admire, I see that it’s been a precise decision-making process for these people. They make decisions based on what they love, and they do only the things that they are passionate about. They play only characters that they can’t stop thinking about.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

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

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

‚Harry Potter‘ gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

I don’t think there is anything wrong in earning money from the sport you love. If you work hard and get benefits from it, there is no harm. The day you feel that you are not working hard and are only looking at the benefits, that’s where the problem is.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

Love in its essence is spiritual fire.

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

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

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.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

At the end of the day, who I really and truly am is a little girl who loved to play the piano.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

Music is like film to me.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.

It’s important to love in hip hop.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

Racing, competing, it’s in my blood. It’s part of me, it’s part of my life; I have been doing it all my life and it stands out above everything else.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

I’m gonna be making records anyway, even if I had to sell ‚em out of the trunk of my car. I’m that kind of musician and singer.