‚Recreative‘ is a word that I invented because in urban culture, with colloquialism, we invent so many slangs. I don’t like the way that ‚recreational‘ sounds – I don’t like to say I do a lot of ‚recreational‘ reading. I like to say that I read ‚recreatively.‘ I do a lot of ‚recreative‘ reading.

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

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

Money has a language of its own.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time – for 40 years – and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I try to do the fancy things out there by going with both hands, making crossover moves, and having a certain creativity and flair to my game.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

You fail only if you stop writing.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

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.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

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.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

Good ideas are free – or at least they should be.

You don’t have to be scared of me, because I am loyal. Why are people so scared of creative ideas and so scared of truth? All I want to do is do good.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

All of my writing is God-given.

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

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.

If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.