Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

I always hated how I looked on camera. I never put a face to my music, which actually made the music that much more mysterious.

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

On a good night, I get underwear, bras, and hotel-room keys thrown onstage… You start to think that you’re Tom Jones.

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.

For me, genres are a way for people to easily categorize music. But it doesn’t have to define you. It doesn’t have to limit you.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

I was a super-duper Tupac fan, and I realized later, when I became a huge Nas fan and a huge Eminem fan, I was drawn to the storytellers. They all told stories in different ways, but they were all like the best storytellers.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

You can’t really imagine music without technology.

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

I can operate in half-a-song format.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

I just love Bowie. I think he’s the ultimate inventor.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

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 think it’s really cool when artists have song titles or album names that are a really conversational sentence.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don’t get me.

I enjoy all forms of music – pop, classical and opera.

I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw – isn’t that wonderful – so I made up a false name.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

You get to a point where it’s like you can’t really do anything right, and people will pick on you for whatever decisions you make, so I just try and take no notice and get on with my music.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

As for my stuff, I’m just doing guest verses for other people’s records. I try to stay recording, because if I don’t, I get rusty.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

Mick Fleetwood was one of my first interviews. And if you’ve ever talked to that dude, he’s the sweetest guy in the world – he’s just a trip.

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.

Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I’ve never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans. The line’s always been really blurred for me. I’ll hang out with them after the show. I’ll hang out with them before the show. If I see them in the mall, I’ll stand there and talk to them for 10 minutes.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

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

When I do listen to music, I’m more prone to listen to the people I’ve always listened to: George Jones, Otis Redding, Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

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

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

You listen to the radio and all the songs sound the same, from 8 in the morning to 12.

From the time that ‚Nevermind‘ came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

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.

I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.