See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

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.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Everything I’ve been thinking, every vision, even down to every shot I throw, it just ends up here in reality. Whether it was in a fight and how to react or whether it was in a stadium with screaming fans or whether I was in a fancy car or the best clothes ever, I always put myself somewhere.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

People should not make me out to be like Jesus; I don’t walk on water.

During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

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

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

It’s time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.

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

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

Being a hybrid maker off and on over the years, I’m very comfortable with the idea and have been the subject of quite a few pretty good mash-ups myself.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

You make ‚em, I amuse ‚em.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

All of my music is honest.

I hate what I look like on TV, and I want to look better, and nothing makes the mothers more jealous.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

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

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

Imagination decides everything.

I have the space and liberty to create.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.