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.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

You’ve got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you’ve got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

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 have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it’s different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He’s very quick.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

I’m trying my best to keep up with all this new technology, and I surround myself with all these wonderful people that are in the know and kind of help me out with all that.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

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

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

I’ve thought sometimes about what I like about football, and it’s playing together.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

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

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to trust your team. It’s a lesson I’ve had to relearn quite a few times.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

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.

It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

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.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

No great thing is created suddenly.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

I don’t know that there is much the United States can do except work with the international community.

Music comes to me more readily than words.