Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

There’s no formula.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

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

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.

Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I’m proud of.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

I just want to keep pushing the envelope without it feeling forced.

I never look at my watch when I’m sketching!

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

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.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys.

In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn’t been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that’s really worthwhile.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.