I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited ‚first chapters‘. I have indeed written many.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

It is a joy to be an artist, but it doesn’t mean very much unless that work is somehow useful in some way and contributes to others.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

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

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

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

History should be written as philosophy.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

I am an artist, and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I’m talking about myself very directly.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw – isn’t that wonderful – so I made up a false name.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

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

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.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

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.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

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.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.