It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

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.

I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

When I was 8, I thought I was Harrison Ford, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Elvis, and Chuck Norris all at once.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

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.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

I can say I’d honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I’ve written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

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

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

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 is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

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.

Some people have a difficult time facing truth and reality. They prefer to live in a make-believe world, pretending that certain things aren’t happening.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

I’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

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

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.

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.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

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

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

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

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Why should poetry have to make sense?