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?‘

Never regret what you don’t write.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

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.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others.

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I was never particularly fond of my voice.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

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.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

I try to do the fancy things out there by going with both hands, making crossover moves, and having a certain creativity and flair to my game.

An agent won’t help you get drafted higher, won’t make you win more games, and won’t make you faster or stronger.

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

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

You want me to own a team and deal with these rich, spoiled stubborn athletes, and try to get them to perform? No thank you.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it’s been something I’ve been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it’s something I hope to continue because it’s interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.

To be honest, I never really considered myself to be too much of an actress. So, whenever I get the chance to do music, I’m always, like, just in it. It’s like, ‚Oh my God, I finally get to do this. I’m so happy.‘

One of the things that we’re trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren’t all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

I just kept touring and touring until it became second nature to go onstage, perform, and sing.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

Think off-center.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

There’s a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you’re self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn’t so easy in a car, and you can’t cover as much ground walking.

I have the ’77 Million Paintings‘ running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I’ll look up from what I’m doing and I think, ‚God, I’ve never seen anything like that before!‘ And that’s a real thrill.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. I don’t know how to do anything else.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

Art is the proper task of life.

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.

I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry.

Tomorrow morning before we depart, I intend to land and see what can be found in the neighborhood.