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

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

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.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

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

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven’t tried that for a while. Maybe this time it’ll work.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

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

The good thing about having chemistry is, when you get to the improv section of a scene, you’ve got somebody to feed off. It can go on and on and on, and the sky’s the limit.

Our words will either bring life and victory or death and destruction. If we want to be happy, we have to be serious about speaking words of life that line up with God’s Word.

I will not leave South Africa, nor will I surrender. Only through hardship, sacrifice and militant action can freedom be won. The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.

I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

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.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

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.

He who is brave is free.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda. We will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

I learned to fly a few years ago in England. It’s the only place I’m completely alone – up in the air, detached from everything.

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.

The tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

The Vietnamese people deeply love independence, freedom and peace. But in the face of United States aggression they have risen up, united as one man.

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

Knowledge is love and light and vision.

Positional leaders ignore the fact that every person has hopes, dreams, desires, and goals of his own. And leaders must bring their vision and the aspirations of the people they lead together in a way that benefits everyone.

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.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

I have the space and liberty to create.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended.

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

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

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

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‚Don’t try.‘ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.