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

If I relaxed, if I took my foot off the gas, I would probably die.

Protect your enthusiasm from the negativity of others.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

Chefs are nutters. They’re all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

I think women go crazy for a reason. It’s not like it just happens.

When I heard ‚Jesus, Take the Wheel,‘ I was like, OK. Some people look at it as a song written for an American Idol, Carrie Underwood, who is wonderful. But when you’re a songwriter listening to a song, you hear something else. I heard that song, and wow.

I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.

Jiu Jitsu is a great workout both mentally and physically. You want to be strong for it and flexible for it.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

If we weren’t all crazy, we’d just go insane.

We have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

I don’t know how to live good. I only know how to suffer.

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

I wanted to write.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

I write some country music. There’s a song called ‚I Hope You Dance.‘ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

I don’t like being alone.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

As a lifestyle you always being the focal point is innately unhealthy.

I’d like to do a completely off-the-wall collaboration. I would like one of my songs to be the hook to a rap song. That would be so much fun!

I’m addicted to placebos.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

I can express myself.

Imagination decides everything.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

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

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

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.

If I feel anxious every time someone is staring at me, well, I can’t control what they stare at, but my reaction is, I’m just not going to go outside the house. I’m going to stay in and chill. And when I do go out, I understand what comes along with that.

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.