I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

I wanted to be in a punk band before I had even heard any punk music.

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.

I do value the respect I get from my contemporaries, but to have Oasis cover my song, to have Puff Daddy cover a song, to have Goldie come along to my gigs – that’s where my ego is at. To have my fellow musicians like what I do, that’s very cool.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

There is no harm in repeating a good thing.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

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 sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

It is a joy to be an artist, but it doesn’t mean very much unless that work is somehow useful in some way and contributes to others.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

I realized the power of hip-hop. I realized how influential this music and this culture are.

The bat is not a toy, it’s a weapon. It gives me everything in life, which helps me to do everything on the field.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

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.

Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it’s my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

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

If I weren’t performing, I’d be a beauty editor or a therapist. I love creativity, but I also love to help others. My mother was a hairstylist, and they listen to everyone’s problems – like a beauty therapist!

I play piano and ukulele, and I taught myself those things just because I wanted to play them.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

You fail only if you stop writing.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can’t really explain – let’s just say it’s all I can really do while I’m doing it.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

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

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

I play piano every day. I enjoy that.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

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.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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.

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

Originality is really important.

‚House of Balloons‘ was special because I had no deadlines, and nobody knew me, so there were no expectations. Spent a year making it perfect. Every song had at least, like, 7 different versions to them before picking the right one.

Music from my fourth year began to be the first of my youthful occupations. Thus early acquainted with the gracious muse who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, I became fond of her, and, as it often seemed to me, she of me.

I’m a painter in sound.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer. No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.

Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

I think every entertainer’s had nights when things go wrong. I mean you can’t remember everything all the time, and especially if you’re having hard times personally, things going on that you – you know, and then people make it worse. And that makes you feel worse.

Mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston, I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‚Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.‘

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.