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.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

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 I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that – that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.

I’m still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

I’m a spokesman for myself. It just so happens that there’s a bunch of people that are concerned with what I have to say. I find that frightening at times because I’m just as confused as most people. I don’t have the answers for anything.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

I can remember earning £5,000 a game playing for Hibs at the end of the Seventies. They let me commute from London, train on the Friday and play on Saturday. That lasted until my friends at the Inland Revenue decided to take two-thirds. That wasn’t very entertaining for me.

I know what I believe, I know what I want to do, and I’m just comfortable saying it, and laying it out there.

It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.

The greatest thing about being a comedian is knowing other comedians. And you get to talk to them. Its the most fun.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says, ‚What kind of music do you make?‘, and you say, ‚Pop music.‘ You may as well have ‚I’m not cool‘ stamped on your forehead.

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.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don’t accept it, it’s their loss.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.

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.

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 praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.

Not all those who wander are lost.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.

I act on impulse and I go with my instincts.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

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 goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.

The most genius thing about the way I create is to create with other geniuses.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

I’d love to go into WWE and have a real knock and see what’s what.

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it’s different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He’s very quick.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it’s funny. And it’s not funny. It’s not.

I love making people laugh. And I love laughing.

I just don’t feel like I have to explain myself.

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.

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

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

When I do stand-up shows at colleges, girls will talk to me after the show, and that always feels good. I like talking to them.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.

I love trying new things.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

Vulnerability is about showing up and being seen. It’s tough to do that when we’re terrified about what people might see or think.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn’t, then why would you say I am.

Married or single, you sisters possess distinctive capabilities and special intuition you have received as gifts from God. We brethren cannot duplicate your unique influence.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.