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?

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.

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.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

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

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.

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

What one has to do usually can be done.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

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

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.

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.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

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.

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.

There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time!

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

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

It’s pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

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

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I worked my heart out to get my degrees. But the minute I graduated, suddenly everyone was asking me, ‚Well, when are you going to get married and start having kids?‘ And the truth is I had no idea how I would balance the expected role of wife and mother with a challenging career.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

I’m a slow worker; I’m, I think, a steady worker.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

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

Man becomes his most creative during war.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

Time is bunk.

For me, genres are a way for people to easily categorize music. But it doesn’t have to define you. It doesn’t have to limit you.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

People are very reluctant to talk about their private lives but then you go to the internet and they’re much more open.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

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.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

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.

I’m never gonna step away from stand-up. I can’t. That’s what got me where I am, and that’s also my muse. That’s how I stay level-headed. That’s what keeps me going.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.

My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each others‘ negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.