There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important.

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

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?

Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

‚Recreative‘ is a word that I invented because in urban culture, with colloquialism, we invent so many slangs. I don’t like the way that ‚recreational‘ sounds – I don’t like to say I do a lot of ‚recreational‘ reading. I like to say that I read ‚recreatively.‘ I do a lot of ‚recreative‘ reading.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

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

Before I speak, I have something important to say.

The way ‚Lux‘ was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

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

All art is quite useless.

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.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

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.

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

When I left Dortmund, I said it’s not important what people think when you come in but what they think when you leave.

After it is all over, the religion of man is his most important possession.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

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

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

Lyrics are so important, but they’re really underrated.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

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

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious.