Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

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

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

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

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand – good heavens! – that’s what I really call troublesome.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

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

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

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I made all my generals out of mud.

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

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

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

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world… If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

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.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

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.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Don’t go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you’ll land in trouble too big for you.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

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

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

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

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

Although I don’t like the way the Chinese do business, I continue to do business in China. I have to. They’re the next world power.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

My business is to prevent the future.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.