If I weren’t performing, I’d be a beauty editor or a therapist. I love creativity, but I also love to help others. My mother was a hairstylist, and they listen to everyone’s problems – like a beauty therapist!

I’m not interested in people positioning me next to other artists.

I made all my generals out of mud.

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

We learn martial arts as helping weakness. You never fight for people to get hurt. You’re always helping people.

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

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

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

In the future, you won’t buy artists‘ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of ‚their‘ works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

In art the best is good enough.

Think off-center.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

The reason I don’t tour is that I don’t know how to front a band. What would I do? I can’t really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

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

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn’t been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that’s really worthwhile.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

All of my writing is God-given.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

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.

To help a friend in need is easy, but to give him your time is not always opportune.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

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.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

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

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

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

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

It’s amazing if you just listen to people. They tell you all the time things that you can do for them, without even realizing what they’re doing. I’ve learned to take notice of those things and if it’s something that I feel God wants me to do, then I try to do that to add joy to their life.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

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.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.