The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

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.

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.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

All mankind love a lover.

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

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

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.

When I was 8, I thought I was Harrison Ford, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Elvis, and Chuck Norris all at once.

Never, and I mean never, allow anyone else’s ideas of who you can or can’t become sully your dream or pollute your imagination. This is your territory, and a ‚Keep Out‘ sign is a great thing to erect at all entrances to your imagination.

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

I’m still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

I hate the idea of genres.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

‚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.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

I can express myself.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

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

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

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

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

I’m an inventor.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

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.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

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

All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

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

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

I try to do the fancy things out there by going with both hands, making crossover moves, and having a certain creativity and flair to my game.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

I used to pretend that my Peugeot driving to the gym in the rain in Dublin was a Ferrari on the Vegas strip.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.