The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

I love to play music. So why endanger that with something like drugs?

My style influences my music and everything around me.

Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

I love singing. I love it, and it doesn’t feel like a chore. It’s an expression.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

The Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Aloysius Grade School influenced my life tremendously. This was due to the fact that they encouraged you always to make sure that God is the focus of your life, and they didn’t allow you to do anything except to the very best of your ability.

As a soccer player, I wanted an FA Cup winner’s medal. As an actor you want an Oscar. As a chef it’s three-Michelin’s stars, there’s no greater than that. So pushing yourself to the extreme creates a lot of pressure and a lot of excitement, and more importantly, it shows on the plate.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.

At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It’s a gift.

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

I believe in a passion for inclusion.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

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.

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

I train and I go home, and when I’m home, I think about training. That’s my life every day, and that’s it.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

I have my permanent muses and my muses of the moment.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

I’ve always been very one-sided about science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.

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

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

Football is unconditional love.

I’m interested in Jackson Pollock’s kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it’s nothing, and yet it’s incredible.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

I made all my generals out of mud.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every calling, is diligence.

I love music, and after my first experience with movies, I can’t wait to do more.

I believe in being an innovator.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

My work as an artist is completely separate from my work as a philanthropist.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

I just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw – isn’t that wonderful – so I made up a false name.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

I am a grafter.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

I like to choreograph and create and design the costumes and do it all and then step back and watch it and then move on to the next project.