My imagination is a twisted place.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

I like being a writer.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

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

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

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

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

I’m honored that everybody’s inspired off my inspiration.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

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.

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

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

I just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

Being a hybrid maker off and on over the years, I’m very comfortable with the idea and have been the subject of quite a few pretty good mash-ups myself.

I don’t think a song should be put in a category.

Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun.

I kind of make a film for myself to sort of express myself.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.

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

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

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.

I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

When I was 8, I thought I was Harrison Ford, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Elvis, and Chuck Norris all at once.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.