I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

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 cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

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

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

I’m honored that everybody’s inspired off my inspiration.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

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

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

I’m interested in Jackson Pollock’s kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it’s nothing, and yet it’s incredible.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

I’ve been fortunate to have had the life I had prior to Hollywood. I wasn’t starving; I was going to eat the next day.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

Life is a matter of really tough choices.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

Life is a dead-end street.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

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.

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.

I’m an inventor.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

I never woke up and thought, ‚I really want to live a bold life.‘

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.