I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

All good art is an indiscretion.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

I believe in being an innovator.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be like: ‚Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.‘

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.

When you’re coming up with new material, it’s not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it’s working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You’re constantly rebuilding.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

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.

All art is but imitation of nature.

Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

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

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

My life is mine to remember.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

I wish every American had an opportunity to sit down, to go to a base, to meet with families, to meet with service members, to sit down with our veterans – because we would think differently about our challenges as individuals.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

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

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

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

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

It’s the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.

It seems like we wake up and it’s a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, ‚What the hell am I doing?‘

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older, you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me.

I think the word rich is all relative.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

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

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.