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.

Young people can create beautiful things.

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

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.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

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

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

If I made a commitment, I stood by that commitment – and try to make it real. Because when you become leaders, the most important thing you have is your word, your trust. That’s where respect comes from.

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.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

People’s blessings give you the power to work tirelessly. The only thing required is commitment.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

I just want to keep pushing the envelope without it feeling forced.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be like: ‚Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.‘

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

You can scream at me, call me for a shoot at midnight, keep me waiting for hours – as long as what ends up on the screen is perfect.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

Don’t make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I’m not.

Tell me I have to be somewhere, and I’ll be there 20 minutes early and stay there longer than anybody else. You hold up a lot of people if you’re not on time.

All art is but imitation of nature.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

I have a slight bit of OCD, I think. I’m not walking around flipping light switches. But when I say I’m going to do something, I have to do it.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

I look like a woman, but I think like a man.

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

If I weren’t performing, I’d be a beauty editor or a therapist. I love creativity, but I also love to help others. My mother was a hairstylist, and they listen to everyone’s problems – like a beauty therapist!

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Commit yourself to a mighty purpose.

You make ‚em, I amuse ‚em.

I left school to concentrate on racing. It was a family decision between my mum, dad and myself.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

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 feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

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.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

I don’t live by all these rigid, weird rules that make me feel all fenced in. I just like the way that I feel like, and that makes me feel very free.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven’t belonged to any company or any system. It isn’t easy to live like this in Japan.

We must use time creatively.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

Let’s embrace being not normal!

Once you have six children, you’re committed.

There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

A good wife is one who serves her husband in the morning like a mother does, loves him in the day like a sister does and pleases him like a prostitute in the night.

I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs.