I like to be creative.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I’m proud of.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

Writing a song is so personal. You have to have trust in someone you’re working with; otherwise, you’re not gonna come out with something that’s really you.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

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

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

My whole life is a theater piece.

The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand. I know what I believe. I’m confident in what I know. And I’m gonna say it. And if folks like it, wonderful. If they don’t like it, I understand.

I don’t see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way – artistically.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Everyone has their style and your style explains a lot about who you are – you feel me? I’ve had style since childhood, so I like to dress how I feel. But maybe I get carried away by some trends.

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 can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

I’ve always had a problem with the average macho man – they’ve always been a threat to me.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

Everyone calls me Bruno; they don’t ever call me Peter – that was just my government name.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

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.

Imagination rules the world.

I like to be myself, and I don’t pretend. For instance, I don’t dress up for occasions; I am what I am.

My life is my argument.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

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

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

I’m terrified of losing my voice.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

I’ve had everything pierced at some point.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

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.

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

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

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.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.