If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

I didn’t know how to deal with success. If there was a Rock Star 101, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me.

I always have to be writing.

I am invariably late for appointments – sometimes as much as two hours. I’ve tried to change my ways but the things that make me late are too strong, and too pleasing.

The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.

I like to speak on matters which matter to human beings, and almost everything matters to human beings.

We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‚to do‘ list.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

Please don’t ask me to do that which I’ve just said I’m not going to do, because you’re burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.

Every man has a right to be conceited until he is successful.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

Our brains are either our greatest assets or our greatest liabilities.

I wish I could shut up, but I can’t, and I won’t.

Fashion is that thing that saved me from being sad.

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 didn’t come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it’s sickening.

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.

Courage – you develop courage by doing small things like just as if you wouldn’t want to pick up a 100-pound weight without preparing yourself.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.

In art the best is good enough.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I’m going through or what’s going on in my life at that moment.

Character is the result of two things: mental attitude and the way we spend our time.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

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.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

The only thing I have to go by is what my mother and father told me, how I was brought up.

I’m of the school of thought where, if you can’t sort something out for yourself, no one can help you. Rehab is great for some people but not others.

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.

Politeness is, you know, is a wonderful thing. Manners are in fact, really important thing. But remember, Jesus didn’t have many manners as we now know.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There ain’t much credit in that.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

I’m a painter in sound.

I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.

To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

What we think, we become.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.