The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

My strong point, if I have a strong point, is performance. I always do more than I say. I always produce more than I promise.

I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

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.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

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

Battle is an orgy of disorder.

I like to work.

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.

I’ve always liked being busy. If I have nothing to do for a week, it just makes me mad.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

I’ve had mixtapes that have been better than albums I’ve heard from other artists. I take my time; I put my heart into it.

One today is worth two tomorrows.

The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.

I have spent the greater part of my life in a hotel room with seven or eight kids, looking after everyone, sorting out fights, wiping noses, handing out towels, not having a clean towel left for me.

The Internet is a big distraction.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

We want to do a lot of stuff; we’re not in great shape. We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We’re a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

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.

I like to choreograph and create and design the costumes and do it all and then step back and watch it and then move on to the next project.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I’m very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I’m feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It’s gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

Comedy isn’t necessarily all dialogue. Think of Buster Keaton: the poker face and all this chaos going on all around him. Sometimes it’s a question of timing, of the proper rhythm.

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 change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

Sometimes, women in families put themselves last until it manifests itself in their own health.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

When I feel I’m doing too much, I do less if I can.

It is a joy to be an artist, but it doesn’t mean very much unless that work is somehow useful in some way and contributes to others.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

It’s an offseason. These days are valuable for everybody.

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

Learn to say ‚no‘ to the good so you can say ‚yes‘ to the best.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.