It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

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.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

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.

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

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

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

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 just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

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

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

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.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

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

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

I hate the idea of genres.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

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.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

The ancients considered mechanics in a twofold respect: as rational, which proceeds accurately by demonstration, and practical. To practical mechanics all the manual arts belong, from which mechanics took its name.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

I think when people make a record with a goal in mind – like taking it to the next level or making them seem more mature – that gets in the way of writing great songs.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.