I’m interested in Jackson Pollock’s kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it’s nothing, and yet it’s incredible.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

Young people can create beautiful things.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

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.

There are times when I prefer a cerebral moment with an artist, and I’ll just enjoy the wit of a Picabia or a Duchamp. It amuses me that they thought that what they did would be a good way of making art.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

The artist in me cries out for design.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

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.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

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.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

I create stars.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

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.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

I like being a writer.

When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.

I like the app where you can make your own memes. I make memes all the time and send them to my friends.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

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’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.