There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

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

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

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.

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

Energy begets energy.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

My recollection is – and I’d have to confirm this – but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.

I don’t have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute song.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

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.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

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.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

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.

I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Everybody thinks making films back to back is a big deal but they did it all the time in the old days.

You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.

Your life must be a progression towards ownership – first mentally of your independence, and then physically of your work, owning what you produce.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

You fail only if you stop writing.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

I kind of make a film for myself to sort of express myself.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

I’ve been writing my entire life, and I’ll always write.

Make measurable progress in reasonable time.

I realize I don’t do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn’t sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours‘ writing. Nothing.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.