The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

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

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

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.

I like the app where you can make your own memes. I make memes all the time and send them to my friends.

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.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Creative people don’t behave very well generally. If you’re looking for examples of good relationships in show business, you’re gonna be depressed real fast. I don’t have time for anything else right now but work and my daughter. She’s my first priority.

When I am putting looks together, I dare myself to make something work. I always look for the most interesting silhouette or something that’s a little off, but I have to figure it out. I have to make it me. I think that’s the thrill in fashion.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

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.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

We have lost contact with reality, the simplicity of life.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

You can’t be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who’s for you and who’s against you.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

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

I believe in being an innovator.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

People like to build their own story about my life. I don’t know if it makes them feel better, or if it makes it okay for them to not like me, but the last thing I grew up as was rich.

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.