I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

One good thing about acting in film is that it’s good therapy.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

I know so many people who feel hopeless, and they ask me, ‚What should I do?‘ And I say: ‚Act. Do something.‘ Because that is the best medicine against sadness and depression.

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.

I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is – I don’t even want to say that it’s mine, because it’s yours.

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?

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

I do suffer from depression, I suppose. Which isn’t that unusual. You know, a lot of people do.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

I talk to myself all the time. Just make sure you answer.

I’m a super-duper over-analyzer. You mix that with self-doubt and pressure, and that’s never healthy.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

I think that, whatever happens, I’m just happy I’ve written those songs and I’ve made an album. That’s really big for me, and I’m proud of that.

All art is quite useless.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

When you’re coming up with new material, it’s not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it’s working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You’re constantly rebuilding.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

Being a hybrid maker off and on over the years, I’m very comfortable with the idea and have been the subject of quite a few pretty good mash-ups myself.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

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.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

Why should I stop working? If I do, I’ll die and it’ll all be finished.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

If you don’t feel safe as a child, you can’t learn.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

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.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

I’m an inventor.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

I love dresses, and I’ve definitely thought about designing them someday. I just want to make sure that I wait until the time is perfect and I can do it right.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

I’m the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.