It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

I like to choreograph and create and design the costumes and do it all and then step back and watch it and then move on to the next project.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

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

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

I’m no natural beauty. If I’m gonna have any looks at all, I’m gonna have to create them.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

In art the best is good enough.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

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.

I mean, when you grow up in the inner city and you grow up in a single-parent household, that’s – those are humbling times, you know?

Without education, your children can never really meet the challenges they will face. So it’s very important to give children education and explain that they should play a role for their country.

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

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.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

I tend not to like an awful lot of what is going out under my name now because it is just all product. Who needs it?

Good luck has its storms.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

The truth is, I’m just a rough old New Zealander who has enjoyed many challenges in his life.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

If I have the chance to say something, I will say it – but that doesn’t obligate me to always say something, or to shed light on every problem, as if I were a lawmaker.

I’m thrilled to have Corona join me on my ‚X100PRE‘ Tour to give my fans a taste of Corona Estereo Beach and showcase their support of Latin music. It’s not solely about the music – it’s about the culture, creativity, and contributing to the movement that connects us all together.

Metal, I love metal sounds. If I have a stick with me, I just drag it across a fence. And all fences make different sounds, just like people when they laugh.

The best fashion advice I’d say would be just to do what makes you comfortable and what makes you feel cute, and that’s how you’re gonna look your best ‚cause when you feel your best, everybody else can feel it, too.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

I have the space and liberty to create.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

I wrote my first song at 12 and remember someone asking, ‚What were you going through at 12 that you could write about?‘ I get what you’re saying, but 11, 12, 13 were the hardest years of my life. You learn everything. You learn how horrible things feel.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

I don’t want followers.

You have to be smart. The easy days are over.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

Life is a matter of really tough choices.

I’ve never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

It’s good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that’s better than you’d imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

Clinicians, academicians, and politicians are often put to a test of faith. In pursuit of their goals, will their religion show or will it be hidden? Are they tied back to God or to man?