I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

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

I have my permanent muses and my muses of the moment.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

The concept of commercialism in the fashion and art world is looked down upon. You know, just to think, ‚What amount of creativity does it take to make something that masses of people like?‘ And, ‚How does creativity apply across the board?‘

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

I’m just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

I’m nobody, who are you?

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

‚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.

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

There is spontaneity to my work.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

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 never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

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

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

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.

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.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

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.

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

The beauty of me being on stage is I have a voice.

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

Think off-center.

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

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

The truth of it is that every singer out there with songs on the radio is raising the next generation, so make your words count.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.