I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

My imagination is a twisted place.

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.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

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

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

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 a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

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

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

I have so many designs and video ideas and lyrics in my head, so I always try to be productive.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

I’m never gonna step away from stand-up. I can’t. That’s what got me where I am, and that’s also my muse. That’s how I stay level-headed. That’s what keeps me going.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

It’s tough to go to sleep at night, and I wake up after five hours because I feel like I’m wasting time. I just sit up at night and think about what I can do next.

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

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

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

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

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.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I 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.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn’t sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours‘ writing. Nothing.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.