I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

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.

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

I’m not looking to exclude people, I’m looking to include them.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

There is something about building up a comradeship – that I still believe is the greatest of all feats – and sharing in the dangers with your company of peers. It’s the intense effort, the giving of everything you’ve got. It’s really a very pleasant sensation.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Creative people don’t behave very well generally. If you’re looking for examples of good relationships in show business, you’re gonna be depressed real fast. I don’t have time for anything else right now but work and my daughter. She’s my first priority.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

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

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

You make ‚em, I amuse ‚em.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

We have a big appetite for putting people down but, at the heart of everyone, there’s enough room for all of us to succeed.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

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

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

I think tolerance and acceptance and love is something that feeds every community.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Why there is one body in our System qualified to give light and heat to all the rest, I know no reason but because the Author of the System thought it convenient; and why there is but one body of this kind, I know no reason, but because one was sufficient to warm and enlighten all the rest.

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

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Me don’t dip on nobody’s side. Me don’t dip on the black man’s side, not the white man’s side. Me dip on God’s side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

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.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.