There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.

I’m an inventor.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy.

I’m still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

I want people to understand they have to live their own lives the way they want to and not just do what we do.

I have always been that girl in the back who doesn’t say anything.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

We all recognize that the Mid-east is dissolving into crises, and we know terrorism did not start with 9-11.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

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.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

But if I have a lot of imagination, I could tell myself whatever I wanted, you know. I handle myself quite well. I’m kind of fascist with myself, you know. There’s no discussion. There is an order. You follow it.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

I worked with Congress on legislation, gave speeches to CEOs, military generals and Hollywood executives. But I also worked to ensure that my efforts would resonate with kids and families – and that meant doing things in a creative and unconventional way. So, yeah, I planted a garden and hula-hooped on the White House lawn with kids.

In time of war the laws are silent.

I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap.

The finest clothing made is a person’s own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk because for years I had been giving myself out in words.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

I’ve had mixtapes that have been better than albums I’ve heard from other artists. I take my time; I put my heart into it.

I’ve always had a problem with the average macho man – they’ve always been a threat to me.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

I don’t think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that’s now history.

I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.

When you’re thirteen and listening to punk, the aggressive nature of music can sway you to the dark side.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

Dressing up is a bore. At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I’m past that age.

The whole aspect of cinema and film festivals should be a moment to come together and celebrate art and humanity. It would be a shame if there was such a divide.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Young people can create beautiful things.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

Rather be dead than cool.

War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.

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.

You can say, ‚Well, isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine‘ – well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter, because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.