I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

When I was growing up, I wasn’t an extrovert. If anything, I was an introverted kid and a very average pupil at school. I was very quiet.

I like to be creative.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

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

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

I have a lot of other stuff to accomplish before I get to kids. Whenever the time is right, I’ll just know. If I had a girl, she’d probably be really rebellious. She would be like a bundle of karma. I would love to bring them up in Barbados.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

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

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

To this day, some of my closest friends say, ‚Gaga, you know, everything’s great. You’re a singer; your dreams have come true.‘ But, still, when certain things are said to you over and over again as you’re growing up, it stays with you and you wonder if they’re true.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

When I was a kid, I never thought much about football. I thought about following in my family’s footsteps and going into professional wrestling.

I can express myself.

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.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

The most genius thing about the way I create is to create with other geniuses.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

When I was a child, there’s one thing I said: ‚I never want to be alone.‘ That’s what I would say. I don’t want to be alone.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.

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

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

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

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important.

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.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

I just want to keep pushing the envelope without it feeling forced.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

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

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.

Kids end up seeing my movies anyway but some of the mothers get mad at me so I figured I’d make one that I can’t get yelled at for.