The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

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

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

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

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.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

My imagination is a twisted place.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I’m proud of.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

Traveling around the world and preaching for over 70 years did not give much time for reflection.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

In art the best is good enough.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

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.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Become aware of your own insufficiency.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

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.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

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

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

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.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.