No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

I had to get rich so I could sing like I was poor again.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

When I was 11 I became very depressed. It had a lot to do with the climate and ecological crisis. I thought everything was just so wrong and nothing was happening and there’s no point in anything.

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

Possession isn’t nine-tenths of the law. It’s nine-tenths of the problem.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

I don’t know that much about who directs what movies, but I’m definitely inspired by the look of old movies; I find them to be really beautiful.

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

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It’s a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we’re telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

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

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.

If you can ask a young man to give his life for his country, you can lead people.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

If it weren’t for painting, I wouldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the extra strain of things.

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

So many people have this idea: I want to achieve something great or be somebody great. And they neglect the step that leads to greatness. They don’t honor this step at this moment because they have this idea of some future moment where they are going to be great.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

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.

There are going to be good days and bad days. Bottom line.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

I have the ’77 Million Paintings‘ running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I’ll look up from what I’m doing and I think, ‚God, I’ve never seen anything like that before!‘ And that’s a real thrill.

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

A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.

If you know how to worry, you know how to meditate. It means to think of something over and over.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

I don’t digest things with my mind.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Worry is a cycle of inefficient thoughts whirling around a center of fear.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

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

Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

Love is a serious mental disease.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

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.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.

Life begins on the other side of despair.