I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

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

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

Of all the subjects on this planet, I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

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

Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger.

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

I’ve been called a moron since I was about four. My father called me a moron. My grandfather said I was a moron. And a lot of times when I’m driving, I hear I’m a moron. I like being a moron.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

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.

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.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.

The worst, most dangerous person to America is clearly Paula Deen.

I’ll say things that are serious and put them in a joke form so people can enjoy them. We laugh to keep from crying.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

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.

If there’s something dangerous, sauces are dangerous for the body.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

Stand-up is my baby.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

My imagination is a twisted place.

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

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

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

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

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

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

I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.

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

If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?

Honestly, I just go to restaurants to eat so I won’t die. If there was a pill I could take in January and then I wouldn’t have to eat again for the rest of the year, I would take it. Of course, I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my chocolate cake and ice cream.

‚The New Yorker‘ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.