I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

I don’t think a song should be put in a category.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

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.

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

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

Power is a complicated word and can take many forms.

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.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don’t believe too much into inspiration, only I’m waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It’s a little too easy to say that.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

Good ideas are free – or at least they should be.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

To not follow your passion in life is a recipe for failure and unhappiness.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

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

If a man had more than one life, I think a little hanging would not hurt this one; but after he is once dead, we cannot bring him back, no matter how sorry we may be; so the boy shall be pardoned.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

Life must be lived as play.

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important.

I kind of make a film for myself to sort of express myself.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.