I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

If you can talk, you can write.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

I like to choreograph and create and design the costumes and do it all and then step back and watch it and then move on to the next project.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

I don’t listen to a lot of new stuff. I just like the old stuff. It’s all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You’d have an entire story in song. I never listen to, like, white music – I couldn’t sing you a Zeppelin or Floyd song.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

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 never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

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

My imagination is a twisted place.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

I don’t plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn’t be a closed system – it’s a quest.

Art is the proper task of life.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

Whatever is on the page is what I’m married to. I’m very prepared. I’m a thespian. I don’t like to improv. I don’t like to go off course ‚cause I think that’s where stuff happens. When you stick to the material ‚cause it’s written so well, that’s where the magic happens.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

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

I have my permanent muses and my muses of the moment.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

I’ve had mixtapes that have been better than albums I’ve heard from other artists. I take my time; I put my heart into it.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

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.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

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

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

There’s no formula.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

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?

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

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

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