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.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to 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.

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

I’m sticking to the script, I’m putting that organic feeling back in the game.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

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

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

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

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.

Man is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

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.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

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

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

There is no memory or retentive faculty based on lasting impression. What we designate as memory is but increased responsiveness to repeated stimuli.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

I am the freest author in the world.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

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.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

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.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

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

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

Young people can create beautiful things.

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

It’s probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.