I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

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.

I don’t think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It’s essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

A letter does not blush.

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

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can’t make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

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

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

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.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

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?

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 want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

I love being on stage, I love being able to tell a story, I love the fact that the audience listens and laughs at it. It makes me happy, and it’s what I live for.

Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I’m a writer.

O, had I but followed the arts!

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That’s the pitch. We’ll see.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

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

I can say I’d honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I’ve written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.

I’m honored that everybody’s inspired off my inspiration.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

I try to do the fancy things out there by going with both hands, making crossover moves, and having a certain creativity and flair to my game.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.