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.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

You fail only if you stop writing.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

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

Labor gives birth to ideas.

I just want to be myself.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

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

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

The best fashion advice I’d say would be just to do what makes you comfortable and what makes you feel cute, and that’s how you’re gonna look your best ‚cause when you feel your best, everybody else can feel it, too.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

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.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

It would be great to be 105 and still making films.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

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

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

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.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

I’m a free spirit.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

The soul never thinks without a picture.

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

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

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.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

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

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.

People are just afraid of things too much. Afraid of things that don’t necessarily merit fear.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

All that self-expression has just created a generation of morons, hooked on an endless appetite for rubbish.

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

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.

The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

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

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

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 biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

I am who I am and I say what I think. I’m not putting a face on for the record.

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

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

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.