I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

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

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

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

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

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

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

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.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

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

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

I tell my fellow reggaetoneros, keep giving it your all and bring more creativity.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

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

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

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

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

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

I wanted to get a job being creative, and I did.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

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