It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

It’s a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

People don’t realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.

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.

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

Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.

It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.

I love to watch videos, and I’ve always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.

Remind yourself that the greatest technique for bringing peace into your life is to always choose being kind when you have a choice between being right or being kind.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‚hurry sickness.‘ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

You need to understand what works best for your own body.

I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don’t retire before I go senile, then I’ll do more damage than good at that point.

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice… No one can prevent you from being aware of each step you take or each breath in and breath out.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

I don’t worry about stress. I create it.

A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

I’m not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.

Don’t wait for the last judgment – it takes place every day.

That summer after the draft was probably the most fun I’ve ever had, because all I had to do every day was wake up and go work out for four or five hours. I got to play some golf, which I love to do, too, and then got to hang out with my family.

There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand – good heavens! – that’s what I really call troublesome.

Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

Life well spent is long.

I think you can give a pure artistic product if you understand how to build your own industry.

Around every corner, always protect the engine that powers you.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

I spend a lot of time reading.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

Whenever you’re going through a tough time, generally, you become more compassionate, you become softer, you become more thoughtful, kinder. These are all spiritual qualities that will help you to align yourself with God and God consciousness rather than with a split fear-based consciousness.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

All good art is an indiscretion.

True happiness is… to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.

I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

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.

I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you’re really tired. It’s my relaxing time.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

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

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.

I want to believe that I am improving. This is something that I take really seriously.

Health is the soul that animates all the enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless without it.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.