I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

I need music. It’s like my heartbeat, so to speak. It keeps me going no matter what’s going on – bad games, press, whatever!

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

There’s more good music being made now than ever before.

Music is always a commentary on society.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger.

Music is my shining light, my favorite thing in the world. T get me to stop doing it for one second would be difficult!

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.

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

Here’s what I think about music and journalism: The most important thing is to just press play.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

I used to draw a lot. If my mother would ask me to do something else, I’d have a hairy conniption. I’d just go crazy.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

I’ve accomplished enough with the music that I haven’t had to go out there and do other things to over-saturate.

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

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

The first rap CD that I had, it was so different for me. The energy, the wordplay, all that caught my attention, and I liked it.

A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, ‚Huh. It works. It makes sense.‘

I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

I sang a lot of low stuff on songs like ‚Secrets‘ and ‚Rockin‘,‘ almost like Toni Braxton. On ‚Secrets,‘ I’m a different person.

I think if I did something in the pop world right now, it would be for Rihanna. I’d love to do something production wise for her.

Chicago gave me more music than any other city in America.

Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

I learned how important it is to entertain people and give them a reason to come and watch you play.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

I have the space and liberty to create.

Music is like film to me.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.

Life is a song to me.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

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

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

I can get where some scientists would say comedians are crazy. What you have to understand: A lot of comedians are dealing with a dark passion. A lot of these are guys coming from a tumultuous life, including myself. Some people need outlets, a way to express yourself.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a musician.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

I sing and play the guitar, and I’m a walking, talking bacterial infection.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

When ‚Paul’s Boutique‘ came out, I was one of the fans that didn’t get it.