It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

If I hadn’t been a woman, I’d be a drag queen for sure. I like all that flair and I’d be dressing up in them high heels and putting on the big hair. I’d be like Ru Paul.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

I think dress, hairstyle and make-up are the crucial factors in projecting an attractive persona and give one the chance to enhance one’s best physical features.

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

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

When we started to do punk, we put all of these things together to create the look of an urban guerrilla – a rebel.

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

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

Fashion is very important. It is life-enhancing and, like everything that gives pleasure, it is worth doing well.

Bling is over. Red carpet covered with rhinestones is out. I call it ‚the new modesty.‘

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.

There’s no formula.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!

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

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

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.‘

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

I didn’t come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it’s sickening.

Here’s the thing: every office I’ve run for I was the first to win. First person of color. First woman. First woman of color. Every time.

I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.

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.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

I hate the idea of genres.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

If I make a fool of myself, who cares? I’m not frightened by anyone’s perception of me.

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.

I would like to be a one-man multinational fashion phenomenon.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

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

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

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.

Imagination rules the world.

When the whole world has their eyes on you, if you say something that doesn’t truly come from your spirit and your soul, or if you wear something that doesn’t come from your spirit and your soul, it’s an injustice to your position. And so, I’m really myself every single day and I do it because I know my fans would want me to.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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.