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

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.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

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

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

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

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

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

All of my writing is God-given.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of ‚Hitchhiker’s,‘ and I thought, ‚No, no.‘ I didn’t want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

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

Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.

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

Substitute ‚damn‘ every time you’re inclined to write ‚very‘; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

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

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

All art is quite useless.

I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I’m very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I’m feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It’s gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.

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.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

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.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

Producing all my own songs and refusing to go to the hot producer. That’s the biggest risk I’ve taken so far.

I could care less about the particular. I like to make music.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.

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.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Writing a song is so personal. You have to have trust in someone you’re working with; otherwise, you’re not gonna come out with something that’s really you.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.