I like being a writer.

Just like every person who works for Dortmund is a fan of the club, it was the same at Mainz. When I was a player there, we had 800 supporters on rainy Saturday afternoons, and if we died, no one would notice or come to our funeral. But we loved the club, and we have this same feeling at Dortmund.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

I never wanted to be a scientist per se. I wanted to be a naturalist.

I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

You fail only if you stop writing.

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

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.

Think off-center.

O, had I but followed the arts!

I’ve had all six of my books reach the New York Times bestseller list, which is especially rewarding seeing as I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write. It just goes to show you that we learn from our mistakes.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

I’m honored that everybody’s inspired off my inspiration.

If you want to be successful, it’s just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

Very rarely do I talk off the top of my head on stage. I’m not an improv guy. I’m a writer-guy who presents what he’s written.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

A letter does not blush.

The things that transfixed you as a child, that you found most exciting was not a passing fancy, but a message about what you’re supposed to do.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

I love movement. I love moshing.

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I’m not that comfortable, which I think is sort of clear.

It seems like when I was growing up there was more compromise, wanting to work with each other, and I think all of them – all of the lawmakers – have hearts to do what’s right, and they all are passionate about it.

Football changed my life and it gave me a platform to get out my aggression and it gave me a sense of value.

Aside from singing, I’m also a dancer. I’ve been dancing since I was 8.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

I don’t know what acting is, but I enjoy it.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Music comes to me more readily than words.