No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

It’s the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

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.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

I affirm to you the tremendous potential you have, not beyond anything you could ever imagine.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

I believe in being an innovator.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

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.

Every album, I make big records. I’m going to always make an anthem. That’s what I do.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

A fool is wise in his eyes.

I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

We can fear things into existence. Fear looks into the future and imagines the worst that can happen.

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

People think I’m a celebrity. I’m not a celebrity.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

I like some animals more than some people, some people more than some animals.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth… I look at everything from this point of view.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals‘ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

I’m the king of the anthems.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.