Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don’t accept it, it’s their loss.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

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

I read everything, but generally more fact than fiction – especially autobiographies and biographies. I’ve read ‚Long Walk to Freedom‘ by Nelson Mandela at least twice on holiday. Every time, I’m totally awed by his vision, strength and forgiveness. I feel honoured to have got to know him and his wonderful wife Graca over the years.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

You don’t have to be like everybody else or do things like everybody else. God created you to be a unique individual, and He wants you to be free to be who He made you to be.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

I don’t believe in guilt; I believe in living on impulse as long as you never intentionally hurt another person. And don’t judge people in your life. I think you should live completely free.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

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

We know what works. Freedom Works. We know what’s right. Freedom is right.

I like to be creative.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

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.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Knowledge is love and light and vision.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Freedom is not enough.

I prefer directing to acting. There is huge freedom that comes from being behind the camera. It brings a lot of responsibilities as well but is intensely rewarding.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

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.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

I don’t think a song should be put in a category.

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

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

Facts, like people, want to be free – and when they’re free, liberty is usually around the corner.

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

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

I’m a really artistic person, and so, with the live stuff, there’s a lot that I think is really cool. Beyonce and Rihanna have all these dancers. So with the live costumes and video costumes, I’d really like to have my vision. The way that I want people to dress is very specific. I love fashion.

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

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.

Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.