No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

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.

I always like to create things that get attention. It used to be a problem when I wasn’t famous. Now, I can do whatever I want and people have to accept it.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

When you’re coming up with new material, it’s not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it’s working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You’re constantly rebuilding.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

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.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

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

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

There are a lot of self-imposed restrictions by people who somehow believe they have to fall in with a certain military cant. There was always a sense that we had to put things into words that would touch our troops‘ hearts, not just their heads.

I’m giving all that I have in this life. I’m opening up my notebook, and I’m saying everything in there out loud.

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.

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can ‚solve the climate crisis.‘ But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

Music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment.

The men who followed Him were unique in their generation. They turned the world upside down because their hearts had been turned right side up. The world has never been the same.

Irrespective of age, we mourn for those loved and lost. Mourning is one of the deepest expressions of pure love.

I didn’t know the term ‚synesthesia‘ until I was working on ‚Cruel Summer.‘ Halfway into writing that, I really understood that, my entire life, I had been trying to describe this condition of mine: through painting, through this seven-screen Surround Vision film we shot in Qatar, through all these things.

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

If you can talk, you can write.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

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

A revolution is not a bed of roses.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

Swearing is industry language. For as long as we’re alive it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

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.

Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

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.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

Beauty without expression is boring.

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

I don’t know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It’s also changing how we’re telling stories.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.