I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

I write songs about stuff that I can’t really get past personally – and then I write a song about it and I feel better.

Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.

No untroubled day has ever dawned for me.

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

You make ‚em, I amuse ‚em.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

In war there is no prize for runner-up.

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

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Frustration is a sign I am acting independently. The more you try your own way, the tighter the doors will stay closed.

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.

When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.

Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

No matter what love throws at you, you have to believe in it.

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 don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

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.

Why did I become Jackie Chan? Mostly because I work very hard. When people were sleeping, I was still training.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

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

You see, God helps only people who work hard. That principle is very clear.

I have to work really hard to get the record deal – I have to spend years at it to get good. I have to practice to be good at guitar.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

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.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

I always was that person who was hard on myself and challenged myself no matter what I was doing, whether it was passing third grade or playing basketball.

I’m not interested in people positioning me next to other artists.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

Imagination decides everything.

Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Never stop fighting until you arrive at your destined place – that is, the unique you. Have an aim in life, continuously acquire knowledge, work hard, and have perseverance to realise the great life.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it.

I am a grafter.