I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

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

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don’t censor yourself, you end up with what you’re most concerned about, but you haven’t filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

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 two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

I’m not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I’m going to say how I feel.

I know what I believe, I know what I want to do, and I’m just comfortable saying it, and laying it out there.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

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

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, ‚No. No, I’m finished. Bye.‘ And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

For my career, I wouldn’t go racing if I didn’t enjoy it. I still need to have my say, and not just get put with a team and get told to deal with it.

I go through a lot of depression, and I know other people do, too, but I have an outlet that so many people don’t. If you have that inside of you and can’t get it out, what do you do?

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

‚Nation‘ was one that I’d have killed myself if I hadn’t written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

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.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

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.

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‚Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.‘

It’s time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.

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.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

It could be if I fight in front of one person or one million people. It’s still the same emotions.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

All I can do is try to create my own brand and have people appreciate me for that.

All of my music is honest.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

I hate the idea of genres.

I am criticised for not celebrating my goals enough. I am very happy from within, very calm. I just don’t celebrate. I celebrate inside.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.