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.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

In business or in life, don’t follow the wagon tracks too closely.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

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

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

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

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

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

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. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

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

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

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!

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

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 capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

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

I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future.

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

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.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

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

It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

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.

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.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

Wherever I go meeting the public… spreading a message of human values, spreading a message of harmony, is the most important thing.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

I am the freest author in the world.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

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.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

Smart habitation is an integrated area of villages and a city working in harmony and where the rural and urban divide has reduced to thin line.

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

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

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.

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.