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.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

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

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

Billy Graham is one of my great lifetime heroes. I think he epitomizes the essence of what a Christian leader should be. I have participated in some of his crusades a couple of times in Atlanta. I’ve seen the profound impact he’s had on me personally, and on other people who were not Christians and accepted Christ as Savior.

If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

I always thought Johnny Carson was just brilliant, and I used to watch him and all the comics that would be on the show every night – and I’d dream about it being me.

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

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

I have a message to give to the world, and I shall not be thwarted.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

While we may lose heart, we never have to lose hope.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.

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.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

I’m interested in Jackson Pollock’s kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it’s nothing, and yet it’s incredible.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It’s a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.

The best thing I did was to choose the right heroes.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

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

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

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

My inspiration is R. Kelly, Michael Jackson, and Prince – for the vocals, anyway.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

In the future, you won’t buy artists‘ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of ‚their‘ works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

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

Great dreams of great dreamers are always transcended.

If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.

I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

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.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

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

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

That is my wish, hope, instruction for all of you: Take your education seriously, okay? Always do that. Because I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for my education.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that’s been made from one of my books, I know that it isn’t going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I’ll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.