The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

If they can make penicillin out of mouldy bread, they can sure make something out of you.

I’m trying to throw a big broad net to try to get people interested in God and believe that He’s for them and has a purpose.

I love dresses, and I’ve definitely thought about designing them someday. I just want to make sure that I wait until the time is perfect and I can do it right.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It’s a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

I worked with Congress on legislation, gave speeches to CEOs, military generals and Hollywood executives. But I also worked to ensure that my efforts would resonate with kids and families – and that meant doing things in a creative and unconventional way. So, yeah, I planted a garden and hula-hooped on the White House lawn with kids.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.

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.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

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

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

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

A lot of my heartbreak songs are inspired by things my sisters are going through, or friends.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

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.

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

Actions are the seed of fate deeds grow into destiny.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

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

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging – weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn’t want to do. I’m very grateful to him, actually.

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.

I gather from motivation around me – from a lot of personalities who have done well in their respective fields.

Beauty is everywhere a welcome guest.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it’s there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

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

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of ‚Hitchhiker’s,‘ and I thought, ‚No, no.‘ I didn’t want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey’s angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.

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

Not having hope is not an excuse for not doing something.

I believe that economics is based on scarcity of markets. And it’s possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.

Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars. Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait. The grip of your hand, the irresistible surge of will and energy to execute your ideas.