If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

I wanted to write.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

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

Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.

I more fear what is within me than what comes from without.

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

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement – it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.

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

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.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

If I could, I would not do anything else. I’d just be in the studio for my whole life. I would never go to parties, events, and red carpets. I would rather just be in the studio for the whole time. I don’t even care. Nobody has to know what I look like. I just want to make music.

When even one American – who has done nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth – then all Americans are in peril.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

I’ve always wanted to make a career in the arts, and I think that my only hope at doing that is to make it more about the work.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

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

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

Everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear.

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

Think off-center.

I enjoy acting when you really hit it right.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

I don’t know who I would have been if I never watched MotoGP.

In everything truth surpasses the imitation and copy.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

Everybody thinks making films back to back is a big deal but they did it all the time in the old days.

Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.

The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.