I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

I personally don’t like to go see romantic comedies. But people do want to see them, and they seem to want to see me in them.

In America there’s no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

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.

Don’t overact the story of your name. Overact the story of your work.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

I try to do the fancy things out there by going with both hands, making crossover moves, and having a certain creativity and flair to my game.

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.

Christmas morning, I’m going to open presents with my kids. I’m going to take pictures of them opening the presents. Then I’m going to come to the Staples Center and get ready to work.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

I like being a writer.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

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.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

All art is dependent on technology because it’s a human endeavour, so even when you’re using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that’s technology.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

At the end of the day, I want to be part of the same conversation as Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Dave Chappelle, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.

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!

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

We were on for six years. We were in syndication for a while. It had its run. I still see the people from ‚Mr. Belvedere,‘ too. We stay in touch.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with Me, to give every man according as his work shall be. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

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

I didn’t know the term ‚synesthesia‘ until I was working on ‚Cruel Summer.‘ Halfway into writing that, I really understood that, my entire life, I had been trying to describe this condition of mine: through painting, through this seven-screen Surround Vision film we shot in Qatar, through all these things.

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

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

I’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

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

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Music is like film to me.

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.

All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.

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.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.