My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Take the complications, rules, shoulds, musts, have tos, and so on out of your life. By uncomplicating your life and removing the trivial pursuits that occupy so much of it, you open a channel for the genius within you to emerge.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

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

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

I try to speak plainly so that my constituents who don’t follow the nuances of government like I do, because they’re too busy earning a real living, can understand the issues before me. None of this stuff is brain surgery.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

I just make the pictures and where they fall is where they fall. If somebody likes them, that’s always nice. And if they don’t like them, then too bad.

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

In America there’s no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

I don’t do research. I never have.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

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

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

Silence is safer than speech.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

I don’t intend to stop making music.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

I don’t let my religious world get too complicated.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

I spend a lot of time just, you know, with my girlfriend and my dog. And I mean, we don’t have a lot of furniture in our house, so it’s really simple. And we’re trying to build products for everyone in the world, right. And you don’t want to get isolated to do that.

I don’t really have any gimmicks. I don’t actually do anything that’s strange. I don’t even wear weird things.

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.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

I’m not an analyzer. I’ve got a son that analyzes everything and everybody. But I don’t analyze people.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

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

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

I was saving the name of ‚Geisel‘ for the Great American Novel.

When I am putting looks together, I dare myself to make something work. I always look for the most interesting silhouette or something that’s a little off, but I have to figure it out. I have to make it me. I think that’s the thrill in fashion.